


Women, Fire and Other Dangerous Things

by TigerDragon



Series: The Girls In Question [13]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Blood, Cults, Desecration of Religious Structures, F/F, Fights, Fire, Implied Torture, Injury, Kill It With Fire, Megalomania, Minor Character Death, Monologue, Pollution - Freeform, Post Season 7, Snakes, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:41:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 41,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Workplace relationships aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world for anyone, but managing a maybe-on-again love affair with your second in command when you're the general of an army of Slayers and the next thing to a living legend is a whole other ballgame of difficult. When you add dealing with freaky cults, a magic suit of armor with a straight line to your id and enough vampires and rogue, murderous Slayers to open a traveling circus, things get even more lively.</p><p>Buffy Summers is starting to think that maybe life in London might not be that much simpler than life in Sunnydale. Still, at least the job includes benefits and travel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The usual disclaimer: We own none of these characters, we make no claims on the IP, and we're flagrantly ignoring the Buffy comics because we feel like it. :)
> 
> Welcome back, faithful readers! We're back with more Slayer action, more Buffy/Faith romance and the next chapter in the story of Slayers, Inc. and their friends. For anyone who's been following our chronology thus far, this picks up where _Investigations_ left off - stormclouds looming on the horizon for our favorite heroes and the Red Right Hand still murderously at large. This time, we have a tale of adventure and travel - of seeking lost secrets and dark treasures better left undisturbed, of vampires and monsters of less supernatural origins. 
> 
> Sit back and enjoy - it's going to be quite a ride.
> 
> P.S. - We stole the title from a study of linguistic categorization that's worth your time to read, if you're into that sort of thing. It just seemed to fit. :)

“Is it just me, or are the London vampires extra stupid?” Buffy was lightly sheened in dust, running the faintest sweat, two floors down an abandoned subway station and two vamps ahead on the night. Life was good.    
  
“It’s the transient population.” Faith rolled left, retrieved her compound bow from where she’d dropped it earlier, came up on one knee and drilled off three shots in four seconds. Perfect heart shots, every one. “They don’t get enough time to get to know the place before we kill them again. Up one.”   
  
Another vampire thought that made it an excellent time to go for Faith’s back. Buffy grinned, vaulted an old Underground rail and introduced his heart to Mr. Pointy. “Still,” she mused, brushing the dust off her jacket, “Sunnydale brought in the tourists too. You’d think...huh.” She heard the flat snap-twang of Faith’s bow again, working like a metronome, but didn’t have time to check the results. Apparently, vampires in London liked dropping from the ceiling. It made things a little exciting. “Maybe these ones just want to un-live in peace. Vampires who  aren’t  looking for the big-league trouble that is us.” Five vamps, eight moves. Faith was right - group action was totally a rhythm thing.  “Weird.”   
  
“So,” Faith said when the dust had stopped raining down out of the air, “when I said it was just a  _little_ vampire nest, I maybe might have misestimated just a bit.”   
  
Buffy’s teeth glinted in the low light. “Hey, as dumb as they were I’d’ve been disappointed if it had been. I needed a workout.” Sliding her stake back into her jacket pocket, she compiled a mental tally. “Anyway, I bagged thirteen. I win.”    
  
“Damn,” Faith grumbled as she slung her bow back over her shoulders. She was wearing her full hunting ensemble: stake and short sword visible at her belt, bracers a subtle bulge under the loose-cut sleeves of her leather jacket, thin kevlar and titanium vest just visible under her halter-top and radio-earpiece firmly seated in her ear - every inch the modern knight-errant. She kicked a thick coating of dust off her boots, then brushed off the tight leather pants that Buffy had not in any way been staring at most of the drive over with an air of indignant resignation. “Before those drop-ins, I really thought I had you beat.”    
  
Rolling her shoulders before stretching both arms over her head (totally not to show off her toned midriff), the blonde Slayer smiled impishly Now it was Faith’s turn to stare, and she certainly did. “I did, too. Maybe next time you’ll be lucky enough to get a bunch dropped on you.”    
  
“Um,” Faith managed eloquently, “yeah.”   
  
Investigating the lack of witty rejoinder, Buffy turned her flushed cheeks and darkened eyes towards her hunting partner. The answering hitch of breath and visible heat in Faith’s face was more than telling - and more than familiar. “Oh.” Buffy’s voice was low and thick with a tangle of emotions, desire showing plainly on her face. She’d closed the distance between herself and the other Slayer before she even realized she’d begun to move, and they were practically touching before she brought herself up short.   
  
“Hey.” It came out softer and more throaty than she’d mean it to.   
  
“B,” Faith whispered, her dark eyes dilated with more than the dim light of the room and her breath a sharp heat against Buffy’s cheek; she eased back a step, and then another, until her back was up against the hard stone of the wall and her breath was coming sharp and fast enough to make her chest visibly heave.   
  
The blonde followed her step for step and curled her fingers into Faith’s front pockets, nails grazing her thighs. “Faith.”    
  
Faith’s breath caught, hard, and she bit down on her lip until it drove the faintest sound of pain out of her. If it wasn’t the sexiest sound Buffy had ever heard in her life, she couldn’t remember what was.   
  
Heart pounding in her ears, Buffy claimed Faith’s mouth with her own, tongue sliding over the bite marks on the other Slayer’s lips and tasting her blood. One hand tightened, pulling Faith’s hips closer, while the other tangled itself in her mass of dark hair.    
  
Faith’s hands came up against Buffy’s shoulders. Tightened, hard, until the skin under them began to bruise. “Buffy,” Faith choked out into the kiss between the shudders that visibly danced up and down her body, “please.”   
  
After a moment, Buffy slowly leaned back, breathing fast, higher functions visibly trying to wrest control from her id. After another breath things seemed to look good for Team Rational.    
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“No.” The word came out in a gasp, thick with heat and barely audible, but once Faith got it out she seemed to gather herself and it came out steadier the second time. “No.” Her left hand dropped to wrap around Buffy’s wrist, the right staying pressed firmly against the blonde’s shoulders, and those dark eyes closed for a long moment before opening again with something resembling steadiness in them. “Please.”   
  
Hurt and confusion on her face, Buffy let go, stepped back and crossed her arms like she was trying to hide the fact she was hugging herself. “Didn’t you--” She swallowed. “The way you were looking at me. I thought...”   
  
“Yes.” Faith swallowed, choked on a laugh, dragged a hand through the dark of her hair. “Fuck, yes, B, of  _course_ I wanted you. Want you. Right now, I want you so bad I think I might just fucking catch fire standing here. But I can’t... I can’t do that again. I can’t be that again. It can’t just be fucking in the dark when we’re both keyed up, or when we need each other for comfort, or just because it seems like a good idea at the time. I can’t and I won’t.”   
  
Drawing herself taller and tighter, Buffy was biting her own lip now. “So, a relationship? With a future and everything?” Her voice sounded distant. “Is that what you can and will?”   
  
“Yeah.” Faith stood her ground, straight and proud and unwilling to back down, her skin on fire with heat but her eyes made of something that was as hard as it was gentle. “A future and daylight on our skin and friends who know where I sleep at night. No lies, no fucked-up trying to hurt each other to show we care, no running to Angel or vanishing without a call or slamming the door in your face. The real thing, B, because I’ve come too far and I love you too much to sell it cheaper.”   
  
Buffy’s eyes widened before she frowned, blinked tears away, opened her mouth and then shut it again without saying anything. Closing her eyes, she took a deliberate breath and let it out slow.   
  
“You’re right. If it’s going to happen, we should do it right.” When she opened her eyes, she looked lost. “I...I don’t know.” She frowned into the middle distance. “I don’t know who I want my future to be with, if anyone.”   
  
“Just no cookie metaphors, okay?” At Buffy’s sudden, sharp and thoroughly betrayed look, Faith spread her hands and crooked a smile. “He’s my sponsor in Evil Anonymous, B. We talk. He was a little bent.”   
  
Face hot, Buffy groaned. “Stupid words and their stupid connotations.”    
  
“Hey.” Faith took a breath, let it out, then stepped in and took Buffy’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead - quick, firm and gentle. “I’m still here, okay? I was supposed to be all locked up, then my best friend and my ex had to go and need my help,  and  _then_ I found myself running a whole damn army of Slayers and you know what? I’m pretty much as lucky as it gets, because if it weren’t for all of that I’d still be cooling my heels in solitary. So whatever you need - time, space, whatever - I can do that. I’m a big girl, and I can take it.”   
  
A little smile pulled up the corner of Buffy’s lips. “Okay. I could use some time. The space we can keep the same. I think we work together well. I can practice my professional boundaries.”    
  
“Professional? I think I mighta heard of that somewhere.” Faith let her go, then brought a finger to her own mouth in mock-thought. “Is that the thing where you’re only allowed to put your hand a girl’s thigh for a certain number of seconds at a time?”   
  
Buffy laughed. “For our purposes, I think that number should be zero.”    
  
“Awww.” Faith faked a pout, though her eyes sparkled with a laughing relief. “Spoilsport.”   
  
“That’s me, the rain on everyone’s parade.”  Posture relaxed a bit, she turned in a circle, staring at the rusted signs, dirty walls, and leaf-strewn floors of the abandoned Tube station. “Speaking of. Do you remember which tunnel we took to get here?”   
  
“That-away, boss lady.” Faith grinned. “I even remember where we parked.”   
  
Buffy sighed.  _Why does she have to call me that? It sounds like it should come with a little uniform on her and I really do NOT need to be having that image right now._   
  
The drive back to Slayer HQ was short - only about twenty minutes - and Buffy was already thinking about grabbing her little Beamer and trucking it back to Chipping Ongar in time for a movie before she finally crashed for the night by the time they pulled in. Still, there wasn’t any harm in being polite, and she let the devil on her shoulder talk her into walking Faith in to the elevator. If it gave her a chance to stare at those leather pants just a little longer, well, that was between her and Shoul-dar, demon of tiny temptations.    
  
The door of the elevator was barely open when their pagers went off.   
  
“Damn,” Faith muttered, checking the number and pulling her card. “Watchroom.”   
  
Pouting, Buffy punched the button for the third floor, muttering something about the creatures of the night and where they could stick their nocturnal lifestyle. Un-lifestyle. Whatever.   
  
The door opened. They did the Big Damn Heroes walk down the hall, Faith popped her card in the slot by the door, and they strolled into Xander’s watchroom carrying enough weapons to slay a small army of demons. Not that there were likely to be any demons in the command and communications hub of Slayers, Inc., but it was the impressive-looking principle of the thing that was important for leadershippy stuff. At least, she was pretty sure that had been the point Faith and Giles were trying to make in the meeting last week. She’d done mocha-almond-fudge cake for the meeting, so clarity had been in short supply.   
  
“Buffy,” Xander said cheerfully, “you’ll never guess who called.”   
  
Dawn, her fingers dancing against the keyboard of a computer she’d borrowed from one of the front-row girls, called back over her shoulder “Someone stole one of the Gauntlets of Vha’al from Wolfram and Hart. They’re going nuts trying to find it. Angel called to let us know - he thinks it might have been the Red Right Hand.”   
  
Xander glared. “Sure, when you say it like  _that_ it sounds all ominous.”


	2. Chapter 2

“So tell me again how it is that we have all this stuff still? Because I thought the Watcher’s Council got all blown up. Plus, how is that that you’re our go-to person on demonic or demon-blooded or whatever artifacts?”   
  
“The vaults survived. They were all reinforced and, y’know, vaulty.” Dawn finished tapping in her access code, waiting for the big metal door to unlock and segment and generally do its cool opening thing, and took the time for a glare at her sister in the process. “And I read, I’ll have you know. A lot. There is a lot of reading, and I am doing most of it.”   
  
“She reads,” Faith confirmed, dead-pan. “In meetings, while we’re discussing strategy, I hear while she had a boy over in her room one time....”   
  
“You had a boy in your room?!” Task at hand completely forgotten, Buffy rounded on her sister, hands on hips, eyebrows somewhere between alarmed and livid.   
  
“I’m eighteen, I have boys - plural - in my room whenever I want, and I also have ancient Sumerian demon-binding texts in my room so maybe the boys are not where you want to start with the overprotective. Not to mention certain other people you had in your room pre-eighteen who are way past London boys on the scale of concern.” Dawn smiled just a little too cheerfully, straightened her well-cut suit jacket and strolled into the vaults. “I’m pretty sure it’s over here with the conjuring cages, but I’m not a hundred percent, so this will take a minute....”   
  
Mouth opening and closing soundlessly, Buffy darted confused glares between Faith’s smug grin and her sister’s back. “I hate both of you.”    
  
She followed Dawn with an extra bit of care - annoying, because Faith seemed to know where she was going, but there was nothing like stepping on a misplaced curse bottle or breaking a mummy plate to ruin your evening. Xander was a walking index of examples.   
  
“Got it,” Dawn mumbled triumphantly from behind something that looked like a crystal octopus turned inside out, then emerged with a rust-marked black gauntlet with an impressive number of spiky bits and stray blade edges that she was holding almost daintily by the back rim of the armguard. “The Sinistral Gauntlet of Vha’al - don’t disturb the rust, I remember this thing and it will ruin your outfit.”   
  
“Check.” Eyeing the thing critically, Buffy came closer. “Does anyone else feel like punching someone’s face in is a great idea?”   
  
“I’m kinda getting that vibe, yeah. I thought maybe it was something you said, but now I’m thinking it’s a magic-charm kinda deal.” Faith edged back a couple of steps and then let out a breath. “Hey. Look at that. Punchy-feelings be gone. Guess it doesn’t have much of a bubble.”   
  
“Really?” Dawn looked up, instantly curious. “The records get a little fragmentary, but it talks about humans running in terror and demons being driven to a killing frenzy. I figured that was just big talk to go with the actual magic of the things, but hey, guess not all medieval evil monks were big on hyperbole.”   
  
“Works for demons and Slayers, huh?” Buffy extended a slender hand closer as if testing for heat. “Guess this search won’t be a distraction from Tyra after all.”   
  
“So... yeah. About that.” Dawn quirked a tiny smile that lacked something in the way of humor or happy in general.. “Remember how back in the briefing I said the armor was a big deal, lost for centuries, very-bad-no-good kind of thing? The demon Vha’al was the power source for the armor--the warlock who actually wore the armor either bound Vha’al into it or cut him into giblets to make it - the source material gets kinda spotty about that - but the key thing is that if you had the blood of a demon yourself it would not only give you a happy-yay rush for killing people but it’d also crank up your juice. Make you stronger, faster, all that stuff - plus a bunch of other things I thought were total exaggeration until about the time you asked about the face-punching thing.”   
  
Buffy shared a worried look with Faith. “Wow. So psycho-bitch has a glove that will make her even more psycho and harder to kill. Do we have any good news or is this just a list of reasons for us to have a good cry?”    
  
“Well,” Faith managed dryly, “at least she’s only got one of the gauntlet things, right? Maybe she’ll feel fashion-conscious about going all Lex Luthor and forget about it.”   
  
“Um...” Dawn cleared her throat. “So. Thing. Kinda big. It’s not just a glove set. It’s a whole suit of armor. Which is, you know, all over. But supposedly having any part of it helps with finding the rest - a hero stole the gorget of the thing back once upon a time, which is how they finally did in the original baddie. Tracked him, set up an ambush with big pointy ballistas. So she probably just has the glove right now, but....”   
  
Faith produced a toothy grin which faked good humor pretty well, considering. “Evil scavenger hunt. Oh, goody. Will there be evil candy packaged with our take-home prize?’    
  
Narrowing her eyes at the gauntlet, Buffy contemplated it for a moment. “Well, so far I’ve resisted the mojo. It’s not going to dig claws into my arm if I put it on, is it?”   
  
Dawn shook her head. “That’s Myneghon. The Glove of Myneghon. Totally different thing. Throws lightning bolts... and you totally know that already, don’t you?”    
  
“Been there, saw that, nearly got toasted. Was there for the unmaking.” Faith rubbed her jaw at the memory. “Well, mostly there.”   
  
A small smile tugged at Buffy’s lips. “Both of us were. Thus the asking.” Glancing between the other two women, the Slayer took a deep breath. “Well, since a sense of direction has not mystically appeared in my brain, the next logical step is for someone to put this on. Twelve-step over here is not eligible, no offense intended.”   
  
“None taken.” Faith’s lips quirked. “I’m thinking you’re the lucky girl’s got herself a new fashion accessory, B.”   
  
“Well, I always wanted an excuse to buy shoes that go with rust,” Buffy smiled. “Dawn, are there other concerns I should be aware of before I do this? Not going to grow horns or anything?”   
  
“No, it shouldn’t make you horny or... I’m just going to stop talking now.” Dawn shook her head, then carefully offered the gauntlet. “Don’t cut yourself with the pointy bits? That’s about all I’ve got.”   
  
“Right.” Buffy took another breath, pulled Mr. Pointy out of its home in her sleeve, and handed it to Faith along with the knife in her boot. Glancing around, Buffy frowned. “Let’s re-locate to somewhere not covered in weapons and magic, shall we? Padding would also be nice if I need a takedown.”   
  
“Padding is good,” Dawn opined as she headed for the door, “me getting this out of my hands before I freak out and try to throw it across the room is better.”   
  
“I’d suggest hot potato,” Faith said, “except for the odds of getting lacerated.”   
  
“Yeah, I think there’s a reason it’s not sharp potato,” Buffy added dryly. After shrugging off her jacket and offering it to Dawn as a carrying sling, they all filed into the elevator.   
  
There were a few new Slayers in the practice studio, girls that Faith nodded to once as they passed. At the end of the long, open room were a number of doors. Opening one, Buffy found a small cell with wrestling mats on the floor and padding on the walls. A few boards and cinder blocks were racked on one wall, presumably for kung-fu feats of precision and/or brute strength.   
  
“Close quarters practice,” Faith explained.   
  
“Good idea.” Buffy took off her shoes and jewelry, put her hair up in a ponytail, and turned to Faith. “Can you tell them to be ready in case you need backup? I still feel awkward around them.”   
  
“I’ll just yell really loud. I do that well.” Faith smiled a hell of a lot more cheerfully than she felt.    
  
Buffy took the jacket-sling from Dawn and stepped into the little room. Dawn, apparently well aware of her non-Slayer squishiness, stayed outside. “Keeps them on their toes?”    
  
“I like to think so. Or it just shows how impressive I am - jury’s still out on that.”   
  
The Slayer sat on the floor, gauntlet in front of her crossed legs, while Faith stood across from her. Flicking the folds of her jacket open, Buffy grasped the edge of the opening and glanced up at her companion. “Here we go.”   
  
The urge to smash things intensified as she pushed her arm further into the glove, like she was reaching into liquid aggression. It affected her hunter’s senses, too, enhancing them beyond her Slayer’s gifts: the colors and shadows of the room became deeper, the sounds of girls sparring were easily perceived through the heavy door, and she could practically taste Faith’s subtle cloud of soap, sweat and whetstone. The other woman seemed to fill the room, press in on her on all sides. By the time her fingers were less than snug in the man-hand-sized mail, she had to close her eyes and breath deliberately to keep from violently reclaiming the space around her.    
  
It tightened up around her like a lover, and the intensity changed. On the one hand, it settled - less urgent, less wild, less incoherently violent. On the other hand, it began making subtle... suggestions. Or maybe that was just her own hyped-up impulse that was trying to convince her how much prettier Faith would look shuddering on the floor with the glove just tight enough around her throat to show her who was boss.   
  
She should get that looked at.   
  
“Okay, so it’s a really good thing I figured myself out on vacation,” Buffy admitted, “Because otherwise I would have torn this thing off by now.”    
  
“What’s it like?” Faith’s voice had more than a hint of fascination and dread mixed in with the honest curiosity, and the glove liked both of those. A lot. Which felt uncomfortably good. The metaphor about the glove fitting her like a lover was getting less metaphorical by the minute.   
  
“Um.” Buffy tried closing her eyes and then opened them again when her brain took all that nice black space as a canvas for gauntlet-induced fantasies. “Like being Called again. It’s taking everything that’s a Slayer about me and multiplying it again.”   
  
“You beat the brawn-over-brains bit of that, as I recall, so I’m thinking you can handle this too. Just takes some getting used to.” Faith walked over to the wall, grabbed a broad heavy board and gave it an exploratory tug. “Let’s try a little experiment, B.” She walked just shy of arm’s reach, held up the board between her hands and met Buffy’s eyes steadily. “Remember this one?”   
  
Nodding once, Buffy pulled back with her bare hand, focused on the spot she wanted to hit, and let loose.   
  
The board broke apart like a cracker, and a little jolt of ecstasy washed over Buffy. It was gone all too soon, and she was back to yogic breathing.   
  
“Shit.” Buffy turned away from Faith, both hands on the wall. She was fairly certain she couldn’t get up to too much trouble in that position.   
  
“Okay, so, A, that was a lot easier than normal and B, I want another one. As predicted.”   
  
“Bingo.” Faith smiled crookedly - Buffy didn’t need to turn around to know that expression. “But you’re not going to go on a board-breaking rampage, right? So you’ve got control, and it doesn’t.”   
  
All sorts of violent, delicious impulses firing in her mind, Buffy nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’m in control. God, this is going to be like that hobo kid with the ring, isn’t it?”   
  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I was about to make a smack analogy, so yours sounds better. Let’s go with that.”    
  
“Smack doesn’t come with demon horses,” Buffy muttered. She was never going to watch a movie with demon horses in it right before bed ever again.   
  
“So,” Faith redirected, “any clue how you get it to point you at the rest of it? Which, by the way, we are so not dressing you up in. That rust does nothing for your coloration.”   
  
A witty rejoinder was precluded by an intense surge of giddy anticipation from the gauntlet. “It really, and I mean  _really_ , wants to get back together with the band.” Buffy opened the door, nodded reassuringly to Dawn, stood still for a moment as she avoided getting her beat-down on, and then walked in a slow circle. “Yeah, going that direction is way more fun than the other directions. I’m beginning to think this warlock was self-medicating for severe depression or something.”   
  
“That or he couldn’t get it up.” Faith gave her a long, considering look. “So... it shrunk to fit you, right? Crazy thought, but... can you make the spiky bits go away?”   
  
Staying firmly in place to keep herself from drifting towards the awesome wall of the training area, Buffy stared at the gauntlet. “More black, more sleek, less Spanish Inquisition,” she told it, concentrating at the same time on a style of armor she’d seen once and liked.   
  
It grumbled - at least, she was pretty sure that was what the spiky-tingly feeling at the back of her neck was - but after a minute or so the metal reshaped itself like water flowing into a new vessel and she had a black-and-gold articulated gauntlet that might actually go with something she owned without stapling her purse to her hand.   
  
“Yay, taste.” Buffy grinned at Faith. “Mostly this is an exercise in why we have therapists, but that part was cool.”   
  
“Less collateral spiking is a win.” Faith gave the gauntlet a slightly suspicious look. “Though that looks like it’s going to be a pain and a half to get off without dislocating your wrist. I’m thinking it’s planning a permanent residence. Probably we shouldn’t pass on that that isn’t the game plan - assuming it’s not smart enough to figure that out.”   
  
The gauntlet hummed with a nasty sort of smugness.   
  
“You had to say that out loud.” Dawn gave Faith a look. “It can hear whatever she hears, and if that piece of it alone isn’t smart enough for planning then the whole thing definitely is. So while she’s doing the lodestone thing, ixnay on the ansplay.”   
  
The gauntlet sent delicate little spikes of irritation up Buffy’s arm and suggested Dawn could do with a spanking. Buffy sighed, then glared at the thing. “No. Bad gauntlet. You get to come out to play when I say so and not before.”   
  
The feeling she got was uncomfortably like being sulked at by a boy. She had an impulse to name the thing Spike and then decided that was a terrible, awful idea.    
  
That was another thing she needed to get looked at.   
  
“Okay,” Buffy said, looking at Faith and Dawn with a little more steadiness and a little less manic murder in her eyes. “We go east.”


	3. Chapter 3

“I’m starting to see why people were upset about that whole colonial thing.” The Slayer’s flashlight threw the Babylonian winged lions into spooky relief in the dark of the exhibition hall after hours. Its stern bearded man-face seemed disgruntled. “Seriously. Is there anything in this place that wasn’t stolen?”   
  
“The Magna Carta,” Dawn piped up helpfully. “Maybe some of the stuff on the second floor.”   
  
“Damn. Remind me to get into the whole imperial conquest thing, B. You get seriously cool stuff.” Faith, one hand resting on the short-sword at her hip, swept her flashlight in a side-to-side curve and whistled half-playfully.   
  
Buffy winced, then glared down at the deceptively elegant gauntlet. “Ix-nay on the under-play. Damn thing’s trying for any crime at all now that it can’t get its murder on.”    
  
“Sorry, B. I’ll keep my eyes to myself.” Faith checked the door at the base of the stairs, found it locked and applied a judiciously chosen amount of force to the lock. It graciously decided to call it a night.   
  
“And here we are,” Dawn said with just a hint of excitement in her voice. “Antique storage central.”   
  
The girls emerged from the staircase into a concrete-floored basement with a miniature city of shelves and stacked crates.  The room went on and on, easily covering the footprint of the massive building and maybe a bit more.    
  
“Damn. I’m glad we have a homing beacon.” The Slayer turned in a slow circle and started walking north down the nearest aisle. This close, the gauntlet was sending ever-more urgent desire through Buffy.    
  
“What’s it like?” Dawn nodded at her sister’s hand. “The beacon.”   
  
Turning down a corridor of crates, Buffy smiled wryly. “Remember that time I said I’d die if I didn’t get Rocky Road ice cream? Like that times ten, and there’s only one store open. I don’t know precisely where it is, but going in the right direction feels...I dunno, productive? Hopeful? It’s like I can smell it.”   
  
Faith reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “You lead, B. We’ll follow.”    
  
It took them forty minutes, all together, and by the time they were done playing what amounted to a very complicated game of cold-cold-warmer-hot Buffy was having to fend off a desire to smash everything between her and that maddening itch of nearness that was dancing just out of reach. The gauntlet was, apparently, not long on patience.   
  
When she finally pulled out a box and saw rusted, spiky metal at the bottom, the relief was almost as intense as the hot, heady rush of exultant pleasure that chased it.   
  
“Uh. I’m gonna need a minute.” Eyes closed, Buffy focused on breathing, hands clamped firmly to the box. There was nothing she wanted more than to tear the armor out of its packaging, put it on, and dance destruction down on the world around her. In a matter of days, the armor whispered, anything she wanted, anything at all, would be hers. It was like being in the sporting goods store with Faith again, all those years ago.  _Want, take, have._   
  
Buffy grit her teeth. “No.” Her murmur was almost inaudible. “The things I want can’t be taken.”    
  
A hot spike of anger flared into her mind, and then Vha’al gave up.   
  
The Slayer opened her eyes. “Ha! I win.”   
  
Faith, kneeling beside her and almost touching her, was close enough that the small jerk of Buffy’s head when her eyes opened almost brought their lips together. Faith was the one who drew back, just a little, but she smiled with so much pride in her eyes that it almost broke Buffy’s heart. “See?” she whispered. “Told you.”   
  
Buffy’s answering smile was shy and a little sad. “Yeah.”   Tucking a stray lock of hair back behind her ear, the Slayer pulled the old rags protecting the armor out of the box. Faith pointed her flashlight into the container as all three women looked into it, curious.   
  
“You found the greaves.” Dawn pulled on a pair of kevlar gloves, reached in and extracted six curved chunks of spiked metal, one at a time.   
  
“The whats?” Plate Armor and Accessories had not been on Buffy’s Slayer curriculum.   
  
“The shinguards,” Faith supplied.   
  
Buffy raised an eyebrow. “We found the Shinguards of Vha’al? Are there matching Cleats of Vha’al to go with?” Her mental image of a demon playing soccer made the armor grumble in offense.   
  
Dawn grinned and held up two of the pieces for closer inspection. They looked like every Goth’s wet dream of footwear.    
  
Buffy sighed. “Always with the spikes.”    
  
The demon suggested, emphatically, that spikes were the latest in utility fashion accessories. Then it rather plaintively inquired when she was going to put her boots on.   
  
Giving the armor a considering look, Buffy removed the unhappy gauntlet for the first time since she’d started tracking the rest of the armor. It had taken less than a day between putting on the first piece and acquiring the greaves, but it felt like much longer.   
  
Even with Vha’al’s anger radiating from the glove like heat from a hot iron, it was still a relief. She let out a long breath.    
  
“Okay, I’m going to de-spike these things and see where we’re going next. Dawn, please get clear.”   
  
“Getting.” Dawn backed up to the very end of the row of ancient valuables, and Faith took her cue to back up about half that distance and put herself bodily between Buffy and Dawn.   
  
_Don’t worry,_ her eyes said silently.  _I’ve got you covered._   
  
Buffy nodded at the other Slayer, slight smile on her lips. “Let’s do this.”   
  
Pulling up a knee-high crate, the Slayer sat down, examining the boots. She was pleased to see that, Tetanus risk aside, all she had to do was buckle them on over her jeans and sensible running shoes. She had the left one on in ten seconds.   
  
The curved plate that guarded her foot changed shape to fit her sneaker while the greave shrank around her leg. It seemed less intelligent than the gauntlet, more like an enraged animal than a conniving tempter.  Its dark desires were visceral, hitting her in the gut and sending shivers up her spine.   
  
_NO._  Her force of will quieted the onslaught to a low growl. Satisfied, Buffy strapped the other one on. Apparently the right one was aware of the beating the left had taken and merely snapped at her psyche once or twice.   
  
“It feels different,” she told her companions as she bludgeoned the armor into reshaping itself. “The gauntlet wants me to vie for world domination. These just want me to go all Buffy-zilla on everyone.”    
  
“Crush, stomp and destroy?” Faith relaxed a fraction, though she kept her hands over at her sides. “Sounds a little simple.”   
  
“Could be symbolic.” Dawn edged forward and glanced over Faith’s shoulder, seeming to consider the problem. “Hands are what we shape and build the world with, feet are for running, stepping on things or kicking them in the face. Simpler purpose, simpler tools.”   
  
“Huh.” Buffy stood slowly, ready to drop to the floor if need be. “They’re easier to control, too--I think.” She frowned down at the greaves, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “I hope it’s not just that I like them more and I’m fooling myself into thinking I’m in control.”    
  
“If I see you gratuitously face-kicking people, I’ll let you know.” Faith relaxed the rest of the way, glancing down at them and then back up with a little grin. “You have black metal booties. I don’t even know where to start with the jokes.”   
  
Buffy tried to look annoyed but couldn’t suppress a smile. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Stooping to pick up the gauntlet, Buffy stuffed it into the duffel bag next to the rope and emergency stakes. Nodding towards the stairs, she strode forward. “We should get going and tell Willow she can stop the anti-security spell. Wouldn’t want anything  else  to get re-stolen.”   
  
“Hey, we can exit through the giftshop.” Dawn smiled with a little too much cheer. “I can totally pick up a postcard and a couple of prints.”   
  
“Felon,” Faith said, and poked the younger Summers in the ribs.   
  
“You should talk.”   
  
“Girls,” Buffy tsked, clanking softly as they climbed the stairs. “You can steal one thing each.”   
  
In the end, they left with the greaves, a keychain of the Rosetta Stone for Dawn, and a print of Elizabeth I that Buffy had head-turned on. Faith had insisted. Apparently, not-together didn’t preclude gift-giving.   
  
They were busy enough giving each other grief over their not-purchased goods that they missed the shadows melting away into the night when they got back to the street. Understandable, really - even Slayers were only human.    
  
Mostly.   
  
One of those shadows stopped a few blocks away to make a call. Halfway over the Atlantic, a pale-skinned hand flicked open an expensive metal phone. Its owner listened for a few moments - very few - and then clicked it closed with a hiss of vexation. A few feet away in the next row of first class, someone shivered.   
  
“The cow,” an athletic girl with white-blonde hair in the second row spat. Her left hand curled into a white-knuckled fist, the manicured nails digging into her palm hard enough to draw blood. The right hand, encased in sleek red metal to just shy of her elbow, only groaned like a steel beam being bent. The scant population of travelers in the compartment shuddered without knowing why. “Uh. And it had to happen  _now_ . Stupid plane needing a stupid living pilot to get me where I want. I  _really_ need to kill something.”   
  
The dark haired, slender woman sitting beside her - expensive suit pants tucked into long boots, her hands expensively gloved in leather, her throat concealed with a scarf so that fully only the paleness of her face was exposed, her hat, shades and long coat folded across her lap - stared up at the blonde with a rapt fascination that took long moments to fade enough so that she could remember to say something soothing. The chances of the plane taking the murder well, after all, were not very good. Night flight or not, a delay might let sunrise catch up to them.   
  
“We’ll find something for you when we get in at Brussels, my love.” The soft, resonant voice was as sweet and dark as red wine. “Something lovely and messy, just for you. It was only bad fortune that landed whatever they took in their backyard - we’ll get the rest for you. Didn’t I promise we would?”   
  
The blonde turned to snarl at the pale woman, the pointed fingers of her gauntlet closing viciously around a slender wrist. “You’d better!”    
  
“I will.” There was pain in that pale face, but no anger. Something that might have been pleasure, in fact. The hand not busily being crushed came up to cup the blonde’s jaw, caressing tentatively as if unsure of its welcome but unable to hold back. “Of course I will.” She didn’t breathe. She didn’t need to.   
  
Vampires didn’t need breath. Just blood.    
  
“I’ll bring you the whole world,” the vampire in the window seat whispered to the girl cracking her wrist.   
  
“Oh, my Dragon.” The rage fell from the girl’s eyes as she released the woman’s wrist. “I know. I know you will. You’ve always kept your promises.” She lifted both of her own hands to the woman’s face, thumbs stroking her prominent cheekbones, smiling with teeth and dark promise.“It’ll be our big, bloody oyster.”   
  
The girl brought the tip of her red thumb to her mouth. With a seductive look, she gave the pointed steel a long, sensuous lick, opening a line of crimson on her tongue. If possible, her companion went even paler. Then she whimpered like a schoolgirl.   
  
Grinning, the blonde pulled her vampire into a searing and thoroughly bloody kiss.    
  
The flight went unmurdered the rest of the way to Brussels. 


	4. Chapter 4

The Summers girls moved through the EuroStar train at a relaxed pace, swaying slightly with the car. Buffy had gotten a taste for rail travel during her vacation--all the seats were comfy, you weren’t confined to the bare minimum of possible space, and they had food and clean restrooms and good views.  
  
Another positive quality Dawn had suggested a few days ago was the speed. They were traveling fast enough to cover ground quickly, but not so fast that they couldn’t disembark if the armor found more of itself. They’d covered most of France in a day and were coming up on Milan in the next several hours. The Watcherette suspected the next pieces were in Rome, and so far Vha’al hadn’t disagreed.  
  
Buffy laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. She was glad that the gauntlet and ‘booties’ were packed in their demon-insulating box in their sleeping compartment, both for her own peace of mind and because having a train full of people staring at your ‘fashion statement’ was not good for subtlety.   
  
Okay, it had been kinda fun to wear the greaves on the Tube back in London. A young man with a half-shaved head and more facial piercings than Buffy had thought possible had even asked her where to get some. But yeah, staring.  
  
“Mi scuzi,” Buffy greeted the guy behind the counter in the dining car. Her Italian had always been awkward, but she liked speaking it anyway. “Insalada, panino pollo, e aqua minerale, per favore.”  
  
Dawn waited until they got to a table to wince. “Where did you learn speak Italian, sis, an off-brand Rosetta Stone program?”  
  
Buffy sat up and primly unfolded her napkin. “His name was Adriano. I may have been a little distracted at the time.”  
  
Dawn buried her face in her hands and laughed herself half-sick. “I bet you were. Xander bet you’d break hearts all over Europe - now I guess I gotta pay up.”  
  
“I wouldn’t call it heartbreaking,” Buffy said around a mouthful of salad. “More with the...nevermind.” She chewed faster.  
  
The quiet snort Dawn gave her made it pretty clear she hadn’t cut _that_ one off in time. “So,” she said after a minute, seeming to have mercy on her older sister’s sudden and very awkward pause, “how was double-teaming the glove and the boots? It looked kinda intense. You know, from the door. Where I was standing.”  
  
Buffy sighed. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I just _really_ don’t trust those things and I’d rather be paranoid than sorry.” She poked the salad thoughtfully. “It was intense. Sorta super-villainy. I only narrowly avoided a maniacal laugh. Y’know, crushing of enemies, bow before me, bwa ha ha.”   
  
“But you didn’t. No maniacal laughing.” Dawn crunched some of her own salad, then smiled in a distinctly no-hard-feelings way. “Think you’re getting on top of them?”  
  
Dispatching the salad efficiently, Buffy moved to engage the sandwich next. “I think I can handle it.” The sandwich was made from actual chicken. Europe did a lot of things right. “It’s tiring to fight them, but that’s what rest and a demon-proof box are for.” Pausing for a sip of water, she frowned at her fork. “I don’t know if we should be happy or worried that Tyra is getting crazier and crazier. Lunatics tend to make dumb mistakes, but they’re, y’know, lunatics. Unpredictable in a fight.”  
  
“Unpredictable out of a fight, too. That’s not a happy thing.” Dawn poked at her salad with a critical eye. “Do you think these were at some point connected to vegetables?”  
  
“Yeah, the salad has not really caught on in Europe,” Buffy conceded. “At least we’re not in Spain. They only have one salad. The same one, no matter where you go.” She took a sip of water. “We have more experience than Tyra. Her vamp has more than all of us combined, but I got a strong second in command vibe from her. I’m thinking she’s not calling the one in charge.”  
  
“Which is weird. Young slayer, old vampire - probably the one with the money, too - you’d think she’d be calling the shots.” Dawn took another disgruntled bite, expression thoughtful. “Any ideas?”  
  
For a long moment, the Slayer watched the rhythmic tapping of her own fingers on the table. “Could be cultish. She did call Tyra a queen. Or maybe--”  
  
The drumming stopped. Twisting her mouth, Buffy sighed. “Crazy stupid in love. That’s what she was acting like.”   
  
“Ah.” Dawn quirked a wry smile and took a bite of her sandwich, then washed it down with mineral water. “So basically you and Faith, but crazy and evil.”  
  
Suddenly sitting  up very straight, Buffy opened her mouth, couldn’t find any words, and decided to look for some out the window while her face burned.  
  
“It’s not---we’re not---”   
  
She sighed again. Stupid countryside and its stupid lack of clever denials or subject changes.  
  
“Buffy,” her sister told her with more than a hint of exasperation, “I’m not fifteen and I’m not an idiot. Of course you are and of course it is.”  
  
The mystical warrior slumped in her seat feeling distinctly like a weenie. “I...There’s so much between us. I don’t know if you can build anything good on that kind of foundation. Not that I’ve been able to build didley squat with _any_ one.”  
  
“Well, considering that you sc... umm... _dated_ two vampires and a government guinea pig over anything like a long term and you were trying to do it in Sunnydale, I guess you didn’t do too badly.” Dawn took a break from chiding to chew some more of her sandwich.  
  
“‘It’s not you, it’s the Hellmouth?” A small smile played on Buffy’s lips. “Okay, maybe I should stop assuming I’m cursed. Still...” She frowned again. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like Long Term Relationship Buffy, but I’m pretty much done with being Casual Hook-Up Buffy. Maybe Nun Buffy. I could convert.”  
  
Dawn snorted softly. “Sure. You’d last a whole week, maybe.”  
  
Buffy laughed. “Probably as soon as they tried to donate my shoes to charity.” After another sip of water, she tilted her head to look consideringly at her sister. “So, oh wise adult-type Dawn, got any brilliant recommendations for Uncertain Buffy?”  
  
Now it was Dawn’s turn to look uncomfortable. She fiddled with her water, prodded her salad, looked out the window. None of those having provided a convenient escape, she finally looked up at her sister and almost whispered the last words Buffy would have expected from her. “I think you should give her a chance.”  
  
Lifting her glass to her lips reflexively, Buffy frowned to see that she’d drank all the water. No more bubbly distraction-slash-thinking-time prop.   
  
“You do?” Now she was the one talking at stage-fright volume.  
  
Dawn shifted, but she didn’t look away. “Yeah,” she said after a few more seconds, “I do.”  
  
“Why?” She’d gotten more control over her voice now. “Last I checked you were in the only-tolerating-because-of-apocalypse camp.”  
  
“Yeah... well, I was.” Now Dawn had her own voice steady, too, and there was a solid edge of determined conviction in it. “What happened happened, okay? She’s never not going to be the girl who tied me to a chair and threatened me with a knife, who threatened Mom with a knife, but … I mean, the things Spike did and the things Willow’s done and let’s not even talk about Angelus and they’re _still_ on our side and Willow’s still your best friend. So where do I get to say that because it happened to me, it’s special and she never gets forgiven? You haven’t been with us the last two years, Buffy - you haven’t seen the way she’s put herself on the line for the Slayers, the way she’s put herself on the line for _me ,_ and you know what? She’s never once asked me for anything. Not once. Not even not to hate her. I think because somewhere inside she still thinks she deserves anything I dish out to her. If anybody’s earned a second chance....” Dawn looked away finally, out of breath and a hint of surprise on her face. “Sorry. Preachy. Just... we worked together the whole time you were gone, and all you have to do is hear her say your name to know how she feels about you. Well, I mean, I had to get over my first big crush before I got it, but you know what I mean.”  
  
Fingers laced together, Buffy nodded absently. A second or two later, she blinked and gave Dawn a questioning look. “I don’t remember you being that way over Xander.”  
  
Dawn’s cheeks heated more than slightly. “I wasn’t.”  
  
“But then who...”  Buffy froze, horror on her face. “Spike?! Oh god. It was Spike. I am suddenly and not so happily remembering how you were around him and infinitely thankful for the wonderful river of denial.” She closed her eyes. And people thought _Angel_ had been a bad relationship choice. When she opened her eyes again, she was looking at Dawn almost pleadingly. “You’re not into girls at all, right? I’m suddenly seeing a major advantage to being a lesbian.”  
  
“One hundred percent straight. At least, I’m pretty sure if I wasn’t Faith would push my... and I should so not finish that sentence.” Dawn suddenly got very interested in her sandwich.  
  
Buffy was nearly white. “So, how ‘bout them FC Barcelona?”  
  
“Yeah... that doesn’t work nearly as well in Europe, B.” Dawn stopped. Blinked. Blushed hard. “I mean, um, sis.”  
  
Buffy covered her ears and screwed her eyes shut. “Kittens. Puppies.  Adriano on the beach. Ben and Jerry’s. Sparkly nail polish. Rainbows.”  
  
Dawn started laughing again, really hard this time, and Buffy was afraid to ask why.


	5. Chapter 5

“You know, B, when Dawnie said you were club-crawling in Rome this wasn’t the kind of place I pictured you hanging out.” Faith stepped around a fresco depicting an angel spearing a dragon, ducked an oversized crucifix that seemed kinda safety hazard-ish and checked her taser for the tenth time. Because even with Slayer strength, it was a lot quieter (and safer) to hit a guard with a few hundred thousand volts than to beat him unconscious. _Better living through technology and all that,_ she liked to tell the Hounds, until by now she only needed the first two words to get a sing-song chorus back.  
  
They were out there right now sweeping the city, looking for any sign of trouble and watching the backs of the local Slayers. She’d come up with the plan, she’d gotten Buffy to approve it, but just now she would’ve felt a lot more comfortable having more of them along to back her up.  
  
Or just keep her from having to be alone with the Summers girls and that tickling, itching vibe the gauntlet and armored boots Buffy was sporting put off. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.  
  
“They kinda frown on tourists breaking into the vaults,” Buffy murmured as she passed a huge oil painting of some dead guy in a dress. Cassock. Whatever. “Though they did have a Vatican-themed club in one of the weirder neighborhoods. I wandered in by mistake but I wound up staying. The fetish crowd are actually pretty nice people.”    
  
Faith took a long beat to take that image in, then cleared her throat. “Yeah. What is it about whips and chains that brings out the polite and considerate?”  
  
Dawn piped up with far too much cheer. “Well, it’s actually part of the community ethos - really has to be, since...”  
  
“Okay, no. My bad, but no,” Buffy interrupted as fast as she could get her voice working. “Big sister veto. I can’t know how you know this.”  
  
Faith pushed open a door a little harder than it needed to be, cutting off any further conversation with the sharp bang of metal and wood against stone, then threw a look back over her shoulder. “Left or right, B?” _Quickly, please, so I can stop thinking about you - either of you - in any image that may or may not involve whips and chains and especially leather._  
  
The blonde paused as she had a dozen times that night and turned in a slow arc where she stood. Unlike the other times, when she stopped facing the passage on the left, she stopped and frowned silently at the empty corridor.  
  
“It feels off. Kinda creepy.” Buffy glanced up and down the hall, still seeing nothing but stone and a retrofitted lightbulb at intervals. “A little nausea-inducing, like it’s pulling me from two directions...Shit.”  
  
“Any chance one of those directions _isn’t_ moving?” Faith started down the hall at the brisk trot, fast enough that Dawn had to hurry to keep her place between the two Slayers.  
  
“No. She’s here.” Hefting a crossbow in one hand, Scythe in the other, Buffy’s expression hardened to a grim, focused intensity. Faith felt her pulse catch, hard, and dropped back into rearguard as Buffy moved past her. The almost-contact as they switched positions in the narrow hallway was enough to get her pulse racing.  
  
_Breathe out. Control is an illusion - don’t try to clamp it down. Let it run out of you like water._ She recited the words in her head, fingers brushing the sword at her hip, and felt her breathing settle and deepen. It slowed the pounding in her chest a little, too. When they got out of this, she was going to have to send Master Cho a fruit basket. Maybe just fruit in a bag - the basket might not get through prison security.  
  
Master Cho liked fruit. It helped her keep her mind off the drugs she’d pulled a hefty sentence for storing in her martial arts center. She hadn’t, as she’d tell anyone who asked, actually been planning to sell them like the jury had banged her up for - she’d just really, really wanted enough coke and LSD to keep herself high as a kite for the next twenty years and gotten a _really_ good wholesale deal.  
  
Life was tough that way. At least Master Cho had remembered how to laugh about it.  
  
“We’re moving away from the vault. Probably up into the Black Chapels.” Dawn interrupted Faith’s thoughts quietly, checking her own crossbow and taser by touch and keeping her eyes up, and Faith fought a rush of pride - Dawn had come with some combat training, after all. But she’d insisted on getting the best the Slayers could give her regardless and that had put her in Faith’s hands more often than not. She’d learned fast that when she couldn’t match the strength or speed of her enemies, situational awareness was the difference between living and dying.  
  
With all of that running through her head, she was still thinking enough to make an observation like that.  “411 me on the Black Chapels, Dawnie.”  
  
“Bunch of monastic and clerical orders popped up during the run of the Inquisition - some of them very militant, very big on defending the Church by any means necessary. A chunk of the ones that died out had their home chapels here, right above the vaults for storing dangerous magical stuff where they could keep an eye on it or maybe use it for whatever crazy they thought needed doing.” Dawn kept her voice low, eyes still searching in the dim light. “When the Popes decided the Inquisition had run out of steam, a lot of those orders got a very quiet axe and their chapels got padlocked as possibly full of a lot of stuff the Church didn’t want to admit to knowing.”  
  
“Great.” Faith let out another long, slow breath. “So we’re going to see the Catholic Church’s nasty under-the-bed stash. Why don’t you two ever take me anywhere nice?”  
  
“I’ll take you both out for gelato after this,” Buffy tossed back in a low voice. “Right now we need to make with the quiet.”  
  
She jogged another silent few meters, then stopped at the base of the next narrow, winding staircase, letting her crossbow hang loose from its strap and holding up a closed fist.  
  
The three paused, holding their breath, and heard the faintest echo of voices above. Faith flicked her eyes to Buffy’s, held them. _Fast or slow?_ That was really the only question left - slow and quiet, trying to sneak up and get a good clean shot... or fast and hard, try to hit them before they got organized. Got a slight nod in return, a single finger. _Fast._ She echoed the look and gesture to Dawn, got another nod and the click of a crossbow’s safety coming off.  
  
She held up four fingers to Buffy. Buffy nodded, matched the gesture, started counting down.  
  
The last of Buffy’s perfectly manicured nails folded down against her palm. They ran.  
  
The door at the top of the spiral was small enough that Faith reflexively dropped a step back, letting Buffy shatter the aged dark wood with a single left-handed blow from the Scythe, and then they were through and standing in the heart of the _bema_ (Dawn had explained that one to her as the area behind the altar and reserved for the clergy on a particularly dull stakeout once) - a few steps behind the altar, between the lectern and the pulpit and almost face to face with the lithe girl kneeling down in front of the altar and firmly in the midst of prying a spiky mass of metal streaked in rust and blood from a truly impressive collection of chains. She turned a savage grin at the newcomers, her expression as devoid of surprise as it was illuminated with bloodlust, and rapped the hard red metal that encased her right hand against the armor hard enough to ring it like a bell. “I love delivery,” she said with the air of someone quite accustomed to talking to herself. “Especially when it comes with party favors.”  
  
A final yank at a chain failed to snap the whole structure loose, and the girl stood with a sharp snort of displeasure that reminded Faith of a hot-tempered stallion they’d been trying to break in at the Wales farm for almost a year now. Her first thought was _tall_ \- the girl was just shy of six feet and built with enough reach and muscle to make her look downright Amazonian - and tossing her Nordic-blonde ponytail over one shoulder was a move right out of a pro-wrestling promo. The blood-red and gold metal wrapped around her upper left arm and the hand-to-shoulder case of bloody metal on her right were even color-coordinated with the black t-shirt and the red leather pants. Her second thought was _crazy._  
  
Faith had seen a lot of shit in her mirror in the time she’d been lost. What she was seeing in the ice-blue eyes looking the three of them over like a hot meal or a good screw … she’d had to go to prison to see that.  
  
Crazy and mean and so very definitely a Slayer. Probably - almost certainly - Tyra, the Red Right Hand herself. _Fuck._  
  
Planting her armored feet in a fighting stance a few feet from the broken door, Buffy holstered her crossbow and hefted the Scythe in both hands while sweeping the room with a glance--medium-sized, annoyingly cross-shaped for more hiding places, draped with black for some crazy Catholic reason.  
  
“You’re wearing my outfit, psycho.”  
  
“Buffy Summers.” The words rolled around on the girl’s tongue like a magic invocation or a particularly dirty catchphrase. “You are soooo last century.”  
  
“Which makes you, what, the cheap decade-later remake?” Faith kept a hand on the hilt of her sword and her taser tight in the other, circling right to clear Dawn’s shot and give herself a better view of the room. “‘Cause as a fan of the original, I gotta say that the production value’s gone way downhill.”  
  
Cold blue eyes narrowed. “I’m going to draw your death out a bit longer for that.” Another crazy grin. “Or maybe just because I feel like it.”  
  
If Buffy hadn’t been waiting for it, concentrating on the extra sense the armor gave her, she would have missed the surge of aggression that came half an instant before Tyra moved. She was still close enough to feel the air rushing around them as she dropped to the floor and tripped the younger Slayer with a sweeping kick. Tyra hit the ground rolling and swearing, pulling a long punching knife from her hip with her left hand as she kicked back onto her feet, and she pivoted fast to throw a cutting shot at Dawn that the smaller girl barely ducked. Mistake - big one. Faith could feel the hot flare of Buffy’s rage from across the room, mingled with the icy pulse of bloodlust Tyra was putting off, and when Buffy lunged forward Tyra pivoted like she could feel the move coming. The two blonde Slayers crashed together, a flash of black and red and gold metal that smashed the stone of the altar to pieces on their way into the pews, a swirling hurricane of fury and ruin.  
  
“Down!” Faith caught the flash of silver at the edge of her vision and shouted, already moving, and the throwing knife flashed over Dawn’s head as the dark-haired Slayer pulled the gladius from her hip and vaulted the communion rail in a charge straight across the line of the chapel’s short stone crossing - the arms of the cross spread out to either side of the _bema._ Perfect ambush locations.  
  
The vampire barely got her knives up in time to stop the savage downward thrust of Faith’s blade.  
  
“You really like putting knives in girls who don’t see it coming, don’t you?” Faith bared her teeth, vaulting back a long step and dropping the sword to a low guard. “How about we see what you’ve got against somebody who can see it coming, dead girl?”  
  
The hair was loose now, wild about that dusky-pale face like an ebony cascade, and it made her look younger. It made her look like a teenager dressed up in her mother’s expensive suit. It probably should have stirred some pity in Faith’s heart for whatever this thing had been back when it was alive, but the cold dead hunger in its dark eyes did a pretty good job of killing that.  
  
Then there was the voice, which was still a nightmare wet dream and not at all person-like. “Faith Lehane. The Dark Slayer. Surely you belong more with us than with _her._ ”  
  
They flicked and probled, steel ringing off steel where knife’s edge met vambrace or sword, and Faith mentally resigned herself to replacing another leather jacket with shredded sleeves. Thinking about that made it easier to keep her rage under control. Rage was stupid, and rage meant mistakes, and this _thing_ baiting her might be just a vampire... but a viper was just a snake, and that didn’t make you less dead if it bit you. “It’s this thing I have about the undead,” she threw back off-handedly. “They make me queasy. Never quite get the smell of grave dirt off them.”  
  
“Not even Angelus - the vampire with a soul?” There was the first gun. _Oh, look, I know all about your past. Come to the dark side._  
  
Please. Faith had been tempted by experts, and this wannabe didn’t even know her piece wasn’t loaded. “Angel?” she snorted, tried for a backhand thrust and took a step back, went in again hard. “Please. That was Buffy’s thing, not mine. Too broody, too much forehead. Not enough hands-on fun, you know? A man oughta know how to shut up and drive.” She had a good angle, snapped off a spin-kick and took it. Once she got the sword in, she’d only need a long up-cut to take the head off and then she could help give Tyra the beat-down she ….  
  
One of those knives flashed, fast and strong and way too sure, and it was twenty months of drilling night and day with Slayers that brought her hand up fast enough to keep that cut away from her throat. To take it on the back of her hand, instead, and even there the shock and the sudden slickness of blood was enough to take her sword out of her hand and send it spinning down into the broken front row of pews. She dove for distance, came up to the vampire all over her and kicked hard and fast. Thought for an infinite half a second that she’d just killed herself by reflex because the move had been exactly what she would have used on a Slayer, not a vampire, and the fighting styles weren’t anything alike.  
  
The kick connected, hard, and the vampire hit the wall with enough force to send dead candles and silver holders tumbling down around her.  
  
_What the fuck was that?_ Faith rolled to one knee, feeling the violence of the fight behind her beating at her skin like a rogue sun, and pulled the stake from the small of her back without taking her eyes off the vampire. _Vampires don’t move like that. They don’t improvise like that. They aren’t that strong._  
  
_Vampires don’t. Slayers do. But Slayers aren’t dead._  
  
Her opponent got her game face on and flashed a fanged smile. Purred in that rich, too-intimate voice. “Your blood smells good, Lehane. It’ll taste better.”  
  
“Keep dreaming, dead girl.” Faith breathed the words, centered herself, took a firm grip on the stake she was already turning slick with blood. “You just keep dreaming.”  
  
The vampire laughed.  
  
A huge, crashing thud turned both their heads back to the _bema_ in time to see Buffy punching Tyra furiously into the wall, blood flowing from the smaller girl’s split lip and several dark marks along her cheekbones. The left side of Tyra’s face was one livid bruise, but in spite of the way it had to be hurting her her lips were pulled back in a savage grin of delight. It was the eyes that scared Faith the most though - ice blue and vivid green, they were both burning with the same bloody and single-minded rage.  
  
Neither of them were thinking about the armor now. Neither of them were thinking of the Scythe, discarded in the aisle between the broken pews, or the black metal katar jutting from the closed door at the back of the chapel. They were thinking about killing each other with their bare hands.  
  
Faith didn’t have to guess what the vampire was thinking. She was thinking the same thing. Which should have made choosing to trust Buffy to handle it, to _not_ dive into that brawl, one of the hardest things she’d ever done.  
  
It wasn’t. The day she’d listened to Angel, that she’d turned herself in and let herself be locked in a cell and decided she didn’t have to be a monster anymore - that had been hard. The first day an inmate had tried to beat the shit out of her and she hadn’t hurt the woman any more than she had to - had let herself take punches she could have blocked to avoid breaking the junkie’s bones - that had been hard. Not falling into Buffy’s bed the first chance she got after a year and a half apart - that had been hard.  
  
Not killing people who really fucking deserved it every day of her life, not getting back on the sweet hot rush of blood and pain that had wrecked her soul and could _still_ feel so good - that was hard.  
  
Compared to that, trusting Buffy was easy.  
  
She started the move before she’d even turned around, counting on knowing the vamp’s next step, and it paid off when the second quarter of her spin brought the stake within a hand's breadth of the leech’s heart. An iron hand in a leather glove wrapped around her wrist, trapping it and crushing the stake free of her hand, but she was already wrapping herself across the vampire’s back in a parody of an embrace and the pain in her shoulder when she and the whole weight of the vamp’s charge went in opposite directions was a small price to pay because her taser was at the back of the vamp’s neck and she’d already thumbed it to max the charge. Two million volts of high amp current would have put any human into instant cardiac arrest, among other things. A vampire was a tougher target.  
  
Not tough enough that it didn’t put this one on the floor thrashing with the back of her neck seared with a flash-burn and her mouth open in a silent shriek of pain.  
  
“Rasha!” Tyra’s scream of rage echoed across the room, and Faith barely had time to look up and see Buffy smashing into the back row of pews like a wayward missile before a gauntleted hand caught her in the chest and smashed her back into the stone hard enough to crack ribs. _Shit,_ her brain informed her with an irritating level of detachment, _that girl hits like a truck._  
  
She was too busy trying to breathe and fight at the same time while having her head smashed back against the stone for a clever retort. If she was still alive in a few seconds, something would come to her.  
  
The distant sound of furniture being kicked out of the way reached Faith shortly before she saw what she thought was a blurry image of Buffy taking a running leap off the communion rail. Half a second later black-armored boots slammed into Tyra’s knees, sending her tumbling to the floor. Instead of rolling away to prepare another strike, Buffy grabbed a fistfull of white-blonde hair in her bare hand and rolled with her opponent, using her hold to pummel the other Slayer in the face with her gauntleted fist.  
  
The smile that gleamed up at her, bloody and wild-eyed, was murderously insane. “I’ll kill you.” Their bodies slammed together, bare hands snatching and seizing for holds while the sharp metal of their gauntlets smashed into preternaturally resilient flesh like badly synchronized battering rams, and Tyra hissed the words almost against Buffy’s mouth as she tried to leverage Buffy back into the wall with a hand around her throat. “I’ll fucking kill both of you, you housebroken, pathetic _wastes_ of power.”  
  
Buffy would have liked to say something cutting in response, but oxygen was not in large supply and she didn’t think wasting it on talking was a good idea. Faith, apparently, felt differently.  
  
“You know what I hate about you people?” Faith’s voice was a rasp, her throat thick with blood and raw from pain, but there was no mistaking it for anyone else’s. Nobody else Buffy had ever known could manage quite that level of derisive contempt. “Not only are you out of your fucking minds, you talk too damn much.”  
  
Buffy had never actually imagined seeing someone hit in the face with a baptismal font before. If she hadn’t been so busy gratefully choking in air, she would probably have laughed.  
  
Tyra, half-coated in marble-dust and bleeding freely from the fresh patch of missing hair on her scalp, came up onto one knee and snarled. It was a low, animal sound of rage, but her eyes were focused now. Not on Faith. Not on Buffy, either.  
  
“You want to lay down on the floor now,” Dawn Summers said from the front row of the broken pews, “because as fast as you are I don’t think you can get to me before I put this crossbow bolt in your head. What do you think, psycho?”  
  
Tyra growled down in her throat. Gauged the two Slayers who’d recovered their feet and had blood in their eyes - metaphorically and literally - and the steady hands of the girl holding the crossbow on her. Smiled around a mouthful of blood. “I think I’m going to enjoy making your sister watch when I kill you, little girl.”  
  
“Like the Watcher says, Tyra. Floor. Hands behind your back. You know, assume the position.” Faith flexed her hands, feeling the blood on them mix with the powdered marble. “Trust me, I’ve got lots of experience. Prison’s just going to love you.”  
  
Tyra ignored her. Dismissed Dawn too, without much more than a last lingering look of ugly malice. She put her attention on Buffy, and she spit blood before she laughed. “We should do this more often,” she said, “until I get around to killing you.”  
  
Then she threw the floor at them.  
  
Not the whole floor, of course. Just a foot-wide chunk of stone from the ground where she’d been crouching.  
  
_Just._  
  
Faith threw herself into Dawn, knocking her out of the way of the flying stone. Buffy made a break for the door, had to duck to dodge _half the door_ flying at her, and by the time she was back on her feet the retreating flare of Tyra’s presence was too far away to be sure which of the twisting corridors of the Vatican she’d vanished down.  
  
With a shriek of frustrated rage, Buffy slammed her armored fist into the wall next to the broken door, sending ancient mortar flying. For a long moment she just stood there, shoulders heaving, free hand clenching and unfurling over and over.  
  
Faith rolled up off of Dawn. Watched her, tense, and only started to relax when that clenched fist relaxed and didn’t close again. “Damn,” she said, feigning a relaxed annoyance she didn’t feel, “does she get to do that? Isn’t there a rule against throwing architecture at people?”  
  
“Says the woman who bludgeoned her opponent with an entire _baptismal font._ ”  Buffy turned back to face her companions, breathing heavily and limping slightly. By the time she’d reached the pews she looked mostly sane again under all the blood and dust and fatigue.  
  
Sinking down onto stone next to the other Slayer, she laid her bare hand on Faith’s shoulder. “Look at me,” she instructed, something like restrained worry in her tone.  
  
Faith tilted her head, looking into the green eyes that she’d spent more nights than not of the last five years dreaming of, and her breath tried to stop. _Let it run out of you like water,_ she reminded herself, and after a long thirty seconds she surfaced from those eyes and let out a long breath that took most of the weight off her chest. Didn’t do much for the ache in her skull, but that couldn’t be helped. The bleeding from her hand had finally slowed to a trickle, at least. _Thank God for Slayer healing._  
  
The tension that had been pulling Buffy’s shoulders tight fell away. “Good. You’re not concussed.”  
  
“Tough head,” Faith told her reassuringly. Cracked a smile. “You should know that. Stone and mortar have nothing on me.”  
  
A smile tugged at one corner of Buffy’s abused mouth. “So I guess you’ll be fine as long as they don’t start making weapons out of diamond.” She held Faith’s gaze for another moment before she let hand and eyes slide away.  
  
“You all right, Dawn?”  
  
“Bumps. Bruises.” Dawn was facing away from them, sitting on the steps that joined the nave to the _bema,_ and her voice was thick with shock. “We have a problem.”  
  
Faith turned around and stood up, fast. Stared.  
  
“Fuck,” she growled eloquently.  
  
Dawn stayed sitting, staring at the empty armor rack and the heap of broken silvered-steel chains. “They blessed these,” she said almost absently, tracing her fingers across one cruciform lock. “They blessed all the chains. For a vampire to handle them... it must have been like wrapping your hands around red-hot steel.”  
  
For a moment Buffy looked like she might erupt in frustrated, exhausted tears. “Good.” Reaching for a chain with her left hand, she suddenly pulled back with a hiss.  
  
“Easy.” Faith caught Buffy’s gauntleted wrist gently, ignoring the rush of echoed pain and rage that it poured over her skin, and her arm went around the blonde’s waist in instinctively sheltering restraint. “Easy. It’s just a glove - it’s not you. And that vamp - Rasha, right? She’s crawling wounded, she’s seared her hands and she’s carrying a spiky pile of metal I’d bet she won’t dare put on. The Hounds know we’re in here, they’ve got the locals backing them up on covering the exits. Stopping Tyra is probably more than they can do, but if a wounded vampire crawls out of this place with a chunk of armor they’re going to take it out. So let’s not write it off just yet.”  
  
Buffy nodded with eyes closed. “I know. I know. I just...” She thumbed the buckles of the gauntlet. “If I could force the armor into tracking the rest of it for me we might be able to catch them before they go to ground, but the stupid things are giving me the silent treatment half the time and yelling at me the other half and I’m too much of a mess to make it behave and I really, really want a bath and to stop having a fight with my gear.”  
  
“Breathe.” Faith’s left hand came up to cup the back of Buffy’s neck, her right still wrapped around the metal shielding Buffy’s wrist, and she followed Master Cho’s teaching on breathing to the letter as she let all the air out of her lungs and let it take her tension and her fear and her worry for Buffy and the pain in her head and the blood-hungry heat beating against her skin out with it. Brought in fresh air, thick with dust and dark and the scent of Buffy Summers, and let it flow out again. Empty her.  
  
“Just breathe.” She filled herself with Buffy’s scent again. Emptied herself.  
  
Breathed out serenity.  
  
They took the next breath together, and the next, and with every exhalation Buffy looked more and more tranquil. The gouts of rage from the armor quieted into smaller, intermittent flares, and soon into background noise. As their synced breathing slowed, Faith began to feel other things from the gauntlet--echoes of pain in her lip, cheek and knee, fatigue, distant worry, and a warm, thrumming pleasure at her touch that very quickly eroded her hard-earned calm.  
  
She breathed it in, felt the hot glow of it dance down along her spine, then let it out. All of it.  
  
That was hard. As hard as standing her ground in the subway station in London had been - maybe harder. But Buffy needed this, and needed her, and she might be a junkie but she’d been clean for four years now and she wasn’t going to throw that away. Not even for the kiss she so badly wanted to feel again.  
  
It took her five long breaths to let it flow out of her.  
  
It took her three more to step back and let go of that connection, but she did it. Did it cleanly, too and then needed a long, deep, purging exhale before she could open her eyes. “Better?”  
  
“Uh.” Buffy turned away quickly, but not before Faith saw her darkened eyes and flushed cheeks. The blonde coughed. “Yeah. Thanks.”  
  
The three of them stood like that with the dust settling down around them.  
  
“Right, so,” Dawn interjected a bit more loudly than necessary, “Let’s get out, radio the gang, get a meal and a shower. We can debrief once we’re clean and fed.”  
  
Faith turned, gave the younger Summers a wry smile, then ran a hand through her hair and winced at the grate of marble dust on her scalp. “Anybody ever tell you, Miss Summers, that you’ve got nerves of fucking steel?”  
  
“You did,” Dawn informed her, “but since you’ve been hit repeatedly in the head today, I’ll forgive you for forgetting.”  
  
Faith started to laugh, winced at the sudden resurgence of the ache in her skull, and fired off a less than effective glare. “No more funny from you, brat.”  
  
“As your supervising Watcher, I have far too much dignity to respond to that.” Dawn dusted herself off, hitched her crossbow over her shoulder and grinned. “Off the record, felon, you have only yourself to blame. Who do you think I learned it from?”


	6. Chapter 6

Clean, bandaged, and wearing an impressive smearing of healing ointments, Buffy walked back to the bedroom she’d claimed slow enough to keep the pain in her knee to dull ache. As she reached for the cord next to the window she paused to look at the lights and people below--at just past two, the nightlife was reaching full swing. Pressing her fingers to her lips, she blew the city a kiss, then let the curtains fall closed.   
  
After punching the pillows into shape, she eased into the blankets. With her knee and lip and array of bruises, tonight was not going to be a happy sprawl kind of night. She clicked the lamp off and did a great job of staring at the ceiling while failing to sleep.   
  
The city drifted by outside. A few lights went out. Time passed. The door opened softly.   
  
Faith whispered across the room like a ghost and settled down on the end of the bed.   
  
“Can’t sleep either?” Buffy scooted into an uprightish recline.   
  
Faith tucked her knees up under her and leaned back against a bedpost, the wry tension of her smile perfectly visible in the dark. They were Slayers, after all - they were built for hunting in the dark.   
  
For killing in the dark.   
  
“What Will told us about Rasha. Can’t stop thinking about it. One of us, now she’s one of them.” Faith’s fingers twitched and tugged at the seam of her jeans, searching for a loose thread that wasn’t there. “Did you ever imagine that could happen? To you, I mean. All that time you’ve spent hunting and killing vampires... all the time that I did, I never...”   
  
Pulling the covers with her, Buffy sat forward, cross-legged.  “Dracula. He had a serious bride-of-the-night fetish, tried to convince me it was a good idea. Didn’t.” Something raw surfaced in her voice, some old hurt. “But...at least a part of me wanted to. Y’know. More power, lack of rotting in the grave, no more hurting.” She snorted. “That kinda immortality is a really crappy imitation of the real thing, now that I can compare, but at the time it was tempting.”   
  
Faith’s voice cracked, just a little. “I never thought about it. I figured hey, they can kill me, how bad can that be? Stupid. I was sticking stakes in fresh vamps all the time, but I never once thought it could happen to me. That they could make me like them.”   
  
“Hey.” Buffy covered Faith’s restless hand with her own. “They won’t. Not while we’re all working together.” Pearly whites flashed in the dark. “Though you could always add a beheading clause into your will, just in case.”   
  
“If I end up like Rasha, you fucking well better.” Faith’s eye caught the light, glittering with unshed tears. “Promise me.”   
  
Buffy’s fingers closed tightly around Faith’s. “I promise.”    
  
_ When Dawn got off the phone with Giles in London, she was so pale and her hands were shaking so badly that Buffy hadn’t even objected when Faith went to the minibar and mixed her a drink. They sat there silently, Faith crouched by the couch where Dawn had stumbled to sit and Buffy in the chair by the window, and they waited for Dawn to pull herself together.   
  
To find out what had scared their Watcher so badly.   
  
“When Faith suggested that vampire must have fought Slayers before or been trained by one, when we got a name... I had Giles get Anna to run Rasha against my index of the Watcher diaries. It’s incomplete, but I figured we might get something.” Dawn took another long swallow of grain alcohol, coughed on it, then straightened her shoulders and glanced over toward the table she’d been working at until all the blood had gone out of her face. Faith, wordlessly, walked to it and brought back a yellow legal pad covered in notes.    
  
Buffy looked hard at her sister, then away, then back. A year and a half had apparently been a very long time in some ways.   
  
Dawn looked over the pad, blinked what might have been tears from her eyes, then went on in a steadier voice. “A Rasha, no last name, who matches our vampire’s description is recorded in the diary of the Watcher Roberto de Mariana beginning in 1486. His notes on her were... quite extensive.”   
  
An uncomfortably twisty feeling took hold of Buffy’s stomach. “Major enemy?”   
  
“No.” Dawn took a very long, very deep breath. “Roberto de Mariana was a close friend and subordinate of Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada, was himself a priest and an inquisitor, and Rasha was his Slayer for four years that we know of. Then his journals just stop.”   
  
Now it was Faith’s turn to look like she’d been punched in the kidneys.   
  
Mouth twisted in a grimace, Buffy sat back hard in her chair. Nobody said anything for a few moments.   
  
“She was a Slayer who worked for the Inquisition? The Spanish one? With all the torture and stuff? And then she got turned, apparently. And then...shit. Then we re-mojoed her.”  Turning her hands over and over in her lap, Buffy could feel all the blood run out of her own cheeks.   
  
Dawn shook her head. “Giles and Willow are talking about that. Willow doesn’t see how the spell could have worked that way, Giles is thinking ‘any Potential’ might include past potential, but they’re both wondering...”   
  
“No.” Faith lifted her eyes to Dawn’s, holding the Watcher’s gaze until she was sure she had Dawn’s complete attention. “I fought her. I felt it. Whatever else she is, she’s a Slayer - or a fucked-up knock off of one, anyway. Get that out to the Hounds, get it out to everybody. Understand?”   
  
“Yeah.” Dawn took a long breath and let it out, practicing her own Zen. “Yeah, Faith, I get it.”   
  
“Good.” Faith let out her own breath, then nodded firmly. “Now tell us the rest of it.”   
  
Dawn looked down at her notes. Looked back up. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then she told them. _   
  
“I think,” Faith whispered in the dark, her hand tight around Buffy’s, “that I liked the Spanish Inquisition better when it was a joke I didn’t get.”   
  
A faint smile tugged at Buffy’s lips. “Did Xander make you watch that too? He wouldn’t leave Will and me alone until we succumbed to the marathon.”   
  
“I liked the bit with the rabbit. That was funny.” Faith echoed her smile, weak as it was. “Next time we fight them, I think we’re gonna need a better plan. This one didn’t work out so well.”   
  
Nodding in sound agreement, Buffy sighed. “Yeah, not so much. I’m thinking something with ordinance. I liked the rocket launcher. I bet Giles could mail me one.”   
  
“You know, I think that actually sounded reasonable. Maybe I need to call my sponsor.” Faith’s smile was wry, though there was a hint of something serious in her eyes.   
  
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to blow up a city block to get her.” She squeezed Faith’s hand again. “We’ll start with musty tome detail, see if Willow has any protection spells we can use, the basics. We can get creative from there.”    
  
“Creative is good.” Faith let out a breath, then lifted Buffy’s hand enough to rest her own forehead against it. She was silent a minute, long enough for their breathing to feel loud in the room, and then she finally pulled in fresh air and let the words come. “You scared me, B. When I saw you and Tyra going at it like that... you scared me. Maybe I should have stepped in sooner.”   
  
Buffy pulled their hands down gently to rest on the coverlet and shook her head. “I was not so much with the thinking during that fight. I’m not sure I could have avoided hurting you, let alone worked with you.” Faith’s skin was warm and a little sweaty from being next to hers for so long. Buffy let her thumb trace patterns over it. “So yeah, definitely not with the good. She’s too strong and too crazy for me to handle, even when I totally lose it. We’re gonna need some serious backup.”    
  
“Back-up, we can do.” Faith’s hand squeezed in hers, and the pitch of that sweet alto dropped subtly as she pulled in another Buffy scented breath. “You just keep coming back to... to the world after your little trips into Buffy smash, okay?”   
  
“Deal.”    
  
They sat in the quiet dark for another few companionable moments, and then Faith shifted her weight towards the edge of the bed. Buffy’s voice reached out to keep her there.   
  
“That zen breathing thing you did.” She bit her lip. “I could tell...I know it was for me. Thank you.”   
  
Faith looked away, eyes searching the dark for something for what felt like a long time before she finally murmured an answer. “Sometimes I think everything’s for you, B. And sometimes I think Angel’s right, that I did it for me - that I had to do it for me. Most of the time, I can’t tell the difference.”   
  
The lighter shadow of Buffy’s hair shook side to side. “It’s yours. It’s part of you. Sharing it with me in the chapel was a gift. So thank you.”    
  
Those strong, calloused hands held onto hers a long second. Squeezed. Then Faith’s head turned back, leaned in, and they were so close that there was almost no difference between Faith’s breath and hers. “You’re welcome,” the whisper shivered across her lips, still hot from Faith’s mouth. “You’re welcome, B.”   
  
Like a ball thrown into the air hanging at the top of its arc, Buffy sat completely still for a moment, then let herself fall slowly towards Faith, lips parting.   
  
Her prepaid phone rang. Both women jumped.   
  
Buffy closed her eyes, counted to ten, then grabbed the jangling device from the side table.   
  
“Yeah?” She was glad it was four in the morning. It was a great excuse for why her voice was thick.   
  
“Buffy. Hi. Right, time. Sorry. Important stuff.” Willow was in rapid-speak mode, which was slightly dizzying on top of Faith’s nearness. “We found something in one of the journals so we sent a team and we might have a lead you don’t have to chase down, and how are things going on your end and did Dawn answer all your questions about crazy Inquisition girl?”   
  
Buffy squinted, frowned, and pressed a hand to her forehead. “Um. Yay lead. We’re resting up in hopes of not saying ‘ow’ every step. And yeah. Creepy.” She rubbed her temples. “Also we’re going to need lots of backup. Did Dawn mention we got our asses kicked?”   
  
“She did. Backup, we’re sending. Well, as much as we can while still sending people to Baghdad. This whole Slayer Army thing sounded cooler before Giles and Xander were talking about having to send people all over the world.” There was a beat. Faith had eased back out of arm’s reach and appeared to be looking for her shoes. “Umm...  how is everyone, by the way? I mean, you guys don’t need urgent medical or anything?”   
  
It was too good an opening not to take. “Hmm, do you think lying around the hotel room bleeding from our ears and speaking in tongues counts as urgent?” Buffy couldn’t remember where her own shoes were. Hopefully light would solve that problem. “Just kidding. We just need to rest and eat our veggies and use those stinky ointments you sent. We’ll be fine.”   
  
“Ha. Ha.” She could practically hear Willow rolling her eyes. “Not funny, Buffy. I worry.”   
  
She sighed. Her sense of humor had gotten wonky after being raised from the dead and still hadn’t completely recovered.  “Sorry. We really will be okay. Well...as much backup as you can send will help that stay true. This girl is really crazy and really powerful.”   
  
Faith stopped at the door a moment. Looked back, face hard to read in the half-light spilling from the hall, then vanished.   
  
“Really crazy, really powerful. We’re talking the Slayer, right, not the super-vamp? Or both?” Willow paused for about a tenth of a second. “Um... did I call at a bad time? You’re doing the awkward-breathing-I’ve-got-a-boy-in-the-room thing.”   
  
On the one hand, Buffy was glad no one was there to see her face turn interesting colors. On the other hand, it felt like sort of a waste.   
  
She sighed. “No, not a boy.” Will was smart. Maybe she’d have some advice.   
  
“Oh.” There was a long beat. Will  was smart. “So... is Faith still there? Or did she hide in the closet or something?”   
  
“No, the closet thing is kinda old.” That was another sigh. “She left. I...well, not now. Maybe later.” Closing her eyes, she clicked the bedside lamp on. “Ow, bright. Anything else? We’re flying to Istanbul in the morning.”   
  
“Not Constantinople?”    
  
“No, Istanbul. Why? Where’s Constantinople?”   
  
“Nevermind. Nothing. Wait, no, I mean, yes. Something.” Willow stopped, possibly to untangle her tongue. “You. Faith. Is that a thing now? I mean... again? It is again, right?”   
  
“Uh.” Sometimes she missed the 90s. Phone cords were good for nervous fidgets. “It was a thing. I’m trying to decide if I want it to be again. It would be serious. Kinda scary that way. The commitment. Not Faith.”   
  
“Not Faith?” Now it was definitely Careful Willow.   
  
“I mean...uh. No. We are not talking about this at four in the morning when I’m all bruisy. Later.”   
  
“Right. Later. When it’s actually a thing again?”   
  
“Yes. No. Maybe. I hate you.”   
  
“Do not,” her best friend sniffed self-righteously. “You’re only saying that to hurt me, and it won’t work. Besides, this is progress.”   
  
“Progress?”   
  
“Sure. Our last four in the morning personal call was how you wanted to fly to L.A. and see Angel and how the boy in your bed was not of the Angel even though the names were kinda similar. You were pretty drunk.” Willow reported  _that_ particular repressed memory with unholy cheer.   
  
“No, I mean it. I hate you.”   
  
“Do not.” Willow giggled into the phone. “Good night, Buffy.”   
  
There was grumbling. Willow politely ignored it. “Good morning, more like. Look, we’ll talk more after Istanbul, okay?”   
  
“Sure.” Willow gave it a beat. “When it’s officially a thing.”   
  
She hung up before Buffy could swear at her, which was  _so_ unfair.


	7. Chapter 7

Jasna Biaram could remember the night she’d been Chosen - tight room, dancing, the pound of questionably legal music and questionably legal doings all around her as she tried to thrash her homesick worries out on the dance floor. The sound of police sirens, the sudden panic in the room, the feeling of being crushed between bodies and the struggle not to be pulled under and trampled.   
  
The strength and sureness that had flooded into her and washed away the stupid, desperate little expat girl still longing for a return to the neverland of her father’s old place in a dead government, that had filled her up with a new purpose, a new certainty of her own place in the world. Her parents hadn’t understood when she’d taken their panicked fear without resentment and given cool reassurance in return. Hadn’t understood the change in her, the way she applied herself to her studies and to learning the language and customs of her adopted city in a way she never had before.  
  
When the Watcher had found her, he had understood.   
  
“I still don’t understand why we have to wait here, _amīrah._ If it was important enough to take us from patrol, surely it is important enough for us to accompany them into the church.” Akilah, her right hand (and best friend, in spite of the fact that it would have horrified her parents to know she was so close to a Persian), set about testing the pull of her bow for the fifth time in half an hour and did her best to make the protest sound dignified. It didn’t, but there was only so much any sixteen year old girl could do about that. Sulking came with the territory.  
  
Jasna, a very hard-earned seventeen, knew what that restlessness felt like and hid a smile. Patience came hard to a hunter, even harder to a Slayer, but patience was the difference between a live warrior and a dead failure. Faith Lehane had taught her that the hard way, and she’d been stubborn enough that the Captain had been forced to break her arm before she understood the lesson.   
  
It was one she’d never forgotten. “We have to live here, Akilah. If we’re seen tearing apart a Christian church, especially you and Sidik, there will be trouble. They are foreigners, and what they do... well, that is a matter for embassies and letters instead of a matter for the police to crack heads over. The General and the Captain understand this. That is why we wait until we are needed.”  
  
Sidik, her black _abaya_ and _niquab_ almost invisible against the half-light of the street, gave one of the soft sweet laughs she’d only come to feel comfortable sharing in company in the last six months. “The way Akilah dresses, _amīrah,_ someone will think she is a foreigner herself.”  
  
“Says the girl rocking Gucci jeans under her _hijab ._ ” Akilah’s tension cracked enough to allow for a teasing grin. “I’d cover your slaying for a week to get a slice of your clothing budget, Sidik.”   
  
“Perhaps if you throw in actually performing your prayers, _okhty_ ....”  
  
“Quiet,” Jasna hushed them. “They’re coming out.”  
  
The Japanese girl in the motorcycle leathers was on point, her hand on her sword, and the dark-skinned Slayer with her bow brought up the rear. Between them were five more Slayers and a Watcher, a considerable hunting party, and the caution with which they moved was a testament to the degree of the threat they feared.   
  
Jasna melted a step back into the shadows, palming her flashlight, and blinked out a message. _All clear. No contact._   
  
The Captain, her hand on the Watcher’s shoulder, blinked back in answer. _No contact. We have it. Form up._   
  
As Jasna and the other four Istanbulite Slayers trotted forward to join the group, the _amīrah_ saw the General stalking in irritation with the Captain close by her side.   
  
“Yes, I’m upset that they weren’t there to fight us. Tyra knows where it is. Where is she? What’s she doing? Why is that more important than getting another piece of armor?” The General gestured emphatically, tension evident in her every movement. “We don’t know, and we’re not going to like the answers.”  
  
The Captain shook her head, cracked a reassuring joke. “Maybe you shipping off the cuisse confused her as much as it did the rest of us - she’s probably not so strict about the ‘below the elbow, below the knee’ rule. She could be chasing after the escort we sent it back with now, trying to get some demon lovin’.”  
  
That was her way when the tension was high - humor. Sidik was the same. Jasna had found it annoying, once. In her defense, she’d been younger then - younger in pain and death, anyway, if not so much in years.  
  
The General had her eyes screwed shut and her tongue sticking out. “One, ew.”  It was strange to see a grown woman behaving like a child, especially when she knew exactly how dangerous the oldest of the living Slayers was. “Two, Willow and the Circle are working nonstop to shield them. I can’t feel where it is, even an echo. They’ll be fine.”  
  
“Sure - even if she could feel them, Ellie knows how to run.” The Captain shrugged. “Just saying, crazy girl isn’t omniscient. Maybe she missed a trick and we got here before her.”   
  
Jasna cleared her throat, inclining her head to the Captain for permission to speak, and Faith Lehane visibly fought down the urge to laugh. “Jasna Biaram, you’re in charge of your own city now and you’ve got as much combat experience as any of us except Buffy and me at this point. How many times do I have to tell you that you can just speak your mind?”  
  
_As many as you like, my Captain, but that does not mean I will do it._ Jasna’s lips twitched in a small grin of her own, but she kept her voice brisk and professional. “There is no good place for an ambush between here and the docks where you have placed your yacht. If your enemy has not attacked you here and now, it is unlikely they will try between here and there. We are twelve strong - perhaps they do not wish to risk a confrontation with such strength?”  
  
“Thirteen,” the Watcher objected, trying to juggle the iron box in her hands and still put them on her hips at the same time. “I count.”  
  
A wicked grin spread across the General’s face. “Of course you do, sweetie.” She accompanied the deliberate patronization with a soft pat on the Watcher’s shoulder.  
  
“You’ve got to forgive Jasna, Dawnie.” The Captain’s eyes, while a bit less teasing, were no less alight with laughter. “She’s old-fashioned - believes in only counting the _real_ soldiers. She hasn’t quite caught up with the twenty-first century. When she qualified for the Hounds and I asked her to stay on after her training, you know what she told me?” Now the Captain’s voice shifted, pitching up into a taut soprano that only vaguely resembled Jasna’s accent. “‘How can I leave my parents? Istanbul is my city - it needs me. I must go home to defend it. Please understand.’”  
  
Akilah’s jaw tightened, echoing the sudden stillness of the local Slayers at the slight to their _amīrah,_ but the tension lasted only a moment before Jasna dismissed it with a smile and a laugh. “It is as you say, my Captain - I am old-fashioned. I must leave falling into filthy holes in farflung places and wrestling with over-endowed demons to my elders.”  
  
The General chuckled and turned to offer Jasna a playful clap. “Zing. Did you pick  up the snark at Slayer school or is that one of your talents?”  
  
“It is a vice of mine, General.” Jasna could feel the heat rushing to her cheeks, but tried her best to grin through it. “However, it is one that my teacher never seemed to tire of.”  
  
“Never.” Faith’s voice changed, an echo of something Jasna was afraid to read too much into, but the flicker of emotion was gone almost before it appeared. “Come on. This thing isn’t going to walk itself home. Let’s move out, people.”  
  
It was not a suggestion.   
  
They were well out of sight of the church when Akilah fell out of formation, her hand to her right ear, and Jasna was half a second from calling out to rebuke her for leaving position when she remembered that Akilah had drawn radio duty tonight. Radio duty that included keeping one ear on the police radio scanner at all times.   
  
Sharp shards of ice started forming in her chest. _Merciful God,_ she began, not knowing how she would finish the prayer but sure in her bones that she was going to need it.  
  
“Something’s happening near the Galata bridge, _amīrah._ The police are confused, frightened. They are calling for help - some of them are calling to God. Some of them are dying.” Akilah’s eyes glittered with unshed tears, her hand going back over her shoulder to draw her bow automatically, and it was only the presence of strangers that kept Jasna’s impulse to reach out to her restrained. “They need our help.”  
  
“Tyra?” The Captain asked, seemingly of no-one in particular.  
  
The General’s face hardened into a thin-lipped frown. “Who else? I hate being right.” Looking the party over, she nodded to Faith. “I figure we have the locals take Dawn and the gorget back to the safehouse, and everyone else heads down to spring the trap. Thoughts?”  
  
Faith shook her head slightly. “Let’s mix it up a little- they know the city and we don’t. That’s a big edge to give up. Jasna, who’s your second?”   
  
“Akilah.” Jasna was already computing routes in her head, the best ambush positions between their present location and Galata, the most likely local creatures to turn up when things turned bloody. “She’s more than capable of seeing the Watcher home.”  
  
“The Watcher is Buffy’s sister, Jasna, and that’s the Gorget of Vha’al she’s carrying. It’s got to be airtight.” Faith flicked her eyes over the group, made a decision. “You’ll take Dawn and the Gorget with you. I’m sending Ariel with you - she’s good in a scrap - and you pick one of your own people to ride shotgun. Akilah and the other two come with us, and we give Tyra nine Slayers worth of dental work.” She flicked a glance over her shoulder at Buffy. “Good with you, boss?”  
  
“Five by five,” the General answered, checking her own weapons. As always, Jasna wondered where such a phrase had come from; despite her time with the Captain, she’d never asked. It was a flickering irrelevance, but it served to distract her from the sudden tightness in her chest.   
  
She signaled for Sidik to join her, then stepped in close enough to Faith so that her voice would carry to the Captain alone. “Let me send Akilah. It is not right that you should risk your life here without me.” She tried to keep her voice steady, to keep the hint of pleading out of it, and she thought she succeeded - the Captain respected toughness, steadiness and serenity, not wavering sentiment, and even the desperation curling its way up her spine couldn’t dig its claws in deeply enough to make her betray the confidence she had already worked so hard to earn. “Let me go with you, my Captain.”  
  
“Jasna.” Faith reached out and took her by the shoulders, voice quiet and very firm, and those dark eyes looked so steadily into hers that she could not have shifted her feet for all the world’s riches. “I need you to do this for me. I know you want to fight, but Dawn’s precious to me - to Buffy and I both, you understand? She’s family, and I can’t go with her to watch out for her. So you take her back to that safehouse by the water and you wait for us, and if we don’t come back by midnight you get her out of town as fast and safe as you know how. Her and the gorget both, you understand? I need to know she’s safe, and that means sending you.”  
  
It hurt - hurt deeply enough that she thought she might not be able to breathe for it - but she could no more have argued with the sincere need in those dark eyes than she could have swallowed the moon. “Yes, my Captain.”   
  
“Good.” Faith squeezed her shoulders firmly, then cracked a small smile. “When this is over, I’ll buy you a drink. A real one.”  
  
“They do not have real Guinness here in Istanbul, my Captain, but we will manage somehow.” In spite of the pain, Jasna could feel herself smiling - she had never been able to avoid that mirroring, that brightening of her own spirits when her teacher was pleased. “She will be safe. You have my word.”  
  
“More than enough,” her Captain told her firmly, then stepped back and met the General’s eyes in a moment of silent communication before clearing her throat. “Move out, ladies. We have people to save and monsters to kill, so let’s hustle.”  
  
They melted into the night, the Captain and the General and seven of the most natural warriors ever to walk on the earth, and Jasna stood still long enough to let them go. Then she turned to the Watcher, met the girl’s eyes and somehow made her voice steady. “Can you run?”   
  
The girl hefted the box in her hand, gauging the weight, and then handed it to Ariel. The Hound tucked it under her arm, as securely as she could, and the girl nodded approval. “Now I can.”  
  
“Good.” Jasna held the Watcher’s eyes a moment longer, gauging the truth in them and liking what she saw. If they hurried, she might be able to spare Sidik or Ariel to assist the others - two would be enough for a guard detail once they were inside the safehouse. “Keep up.”  
  
They ran.


	8. Chapter 8

The Istanbul-based Slayers led the hunting party at a run through twisting cobblestone streets, up ancient steps, and around strolling passers-by. Buffy was glad she’d been hitting the gym lately, especially the treadmill, because she was going to need her strength and speed when she arrived wherever they were going.  
  
She didn’t have long to wait. A few streets from the Galata Night Market, the Slayers began passing people fleeing in the other direction. Buffy didn’t need to share a language with them to understand the terror on their faces or in their screams. After another two blocks, the trickle of running civilians had grown to fill the entire street, and the Slayers had to stop and hug the wall. Hefting the Scythe, Buffy threw a wry look at Faith.  
  
“Well, at least they’re self-evacuating.”  
  
“We could use some more of that in London. The people there just sort of mill around and wait for someone to tell them what to do.” Faith flicked her eyes up to the rooftop of a passing shop, then back to Akilah. She had to pitch her voice into a shout to be heard. “Can we go up?!”  
  
The Iranian Slayer spun on her heel, weaving side to side to avoid the crush of the crowd, then shouted back. “How well can you jump?”  
  
Faith grinned savagely, twirled a hand in the air to signal the Hounds after her, then took a running start through the crowd and vaulted high enough to hit the wooden framework holding up the cloth shading over the tea shop. It groaned under her weight, swayed but held, and she was already twisting her way up between it and the wall by the time it stopped vibrating with the impact. She hit the roof running, jumped the narrow gap between the shop and the next building, and heard the frame rattling behind her.  
  
Her blood sang, but the screaming below smothered the laugh. She ran instead.  
  
She made it another street and a half before she saw what was tearing up the market and stopped so fast Buffy nearly slammed into her and plowed them both off a rooftop.  
  
“Geeze, Faith, don’t do that, I almost...”  As she got a good look at the marketplace, the blonde Slayer’s jaw fell open, her eyes opened wide, and a high-pitched grunt of indignation found its way out of her throat.  
  
“No. She did _not_. You have _got_ to be kidding me.”  
  
The market itself was in chaos, stalls and blankets of goods ripped up, crushed, and strewn everywhere while more people thronged at the mouths of the streets leading away from the scene. Taking up about half the available square footage of the ... well, _square_ was a monster.  
  
Even from their place on the roof, the Slayers’ eyes traveled up.  
  
And up.  
  
And up, to stare at the three heads of a gargantuan snake-demon that was currently thrashing around and snapping two huge sets of jaws at people while the third head swallowed something rather too human-sized for anyone’s comfort. The sky was darkening, stars and moon being drowned out by the first cracks of lightning, and somewhere in the distance thunder boomed like the end of the world.  
  
“Okay. Right. Just another day at the office.” Buffy turned to Faith and one of the locals, both of whom were staring at the demon in disbelief. “What do you think, should I try to chop off heads, or will that only end in tears and more heads?”  
  
“It’s Azi Dahaka.” Akilah pushed her way out of the back to kneel at the edge of the roof, her eyes sweeping from the long necks and fanged jaws down to the long body that vanished into the water beneath the bridge. “An old story. My mother told it to me when I was very small. Evil made it, and it brought nothing but sorrow and pain. The warrior-priest Thraetaona defeated it and lashed it to a moutaintop, but its escape was - is - inevitable. In the end of days, it will kill one in three of humankind and their livestock before a dead hero returns to slay it.”  
  
Faith felt the blood drain out of her own face, knew the same expression was on every one of her Hounds but tried for the joke anyway. “So, does everything about it come in threes or just the heads and the fraction of victims?”  
  
“It is not a joke!” Akilah turned, almost eye to eye with the woman her _amīrah_ called Captain. “It is... this is a creature from the end of the world and you still make jokes!”  
  
Buffy put a firm hand on Akilah’s arm. “She does that. Something about living through a half-dozen apocalypses. You know this thing - okay, that’s good. How do we kill it?”  
  
Akilah, skin bloodless and cool with terror but her eyes steady, visibly tried to compose herself. “I... the stories, they speak of fate that cannot be changed. Of a hero risen from the dead and a river of fire at the end of all things.”  
  
A half-smile playing on her lips, Buffy looked between Faith and Akilah. “I’ve been dead, and fire is kinda a specialty of ours. Azi-whatsit can totally move up its calendar for us. Faith?”  
  
“Fire. Inlet. _Oh_ , yeah.” Faith’s eyes gleamed. “Akilah... heating oil, fuel station, anything. The biggest tank you can find.”  
  
Akilah’s mouth worked for a minute, her jaw hanging open, before - entirely to her own surprise - she started to laugh. “You Americans are insane. I also think I am starting to like you, which almost certainly makes me insane. Kadriye, go with this madwoman and make a fire - Nasim’s place will have gasoline in plenty. For what we are about to do to the Golden Horn, may God forgive us.”  
  
“Pretty sure he will, if he has the time.” Faith looked up again, then swore under her breath. “Big ugly snake, incoming. Move!”  
  
Kadriye and Faith went one way, Buffy and the rest the other, and the building... well, the building didn’t make out so well. Somewhere, she was pretty sure she could hear Tyra laughing.  
  
_Evil magic armor thing? No... no, actual crazy laughing. She’s in the square or above it and she’s getting a kick out of this. I’m really going to kill that ...._  A row of market stalls next to her vanished in a hail of torn cloth and broken splinters as a scaled wall of muscle smashed over it, and she had to dive for cover to miss the snapping jaws that seemed to be playing bob-for-Slayers with the ruins. _I should really pay attention._  
  
After a quick, low scramble to get cover in the mouth of an alley, Buffy kept one eye on the demon--hard not to, really--and let the armor’s tug of longing show her the tall blonde standing in the window of the minaret overlooking the market. Tyra had an unholy grin on her face that alone could have sent crowds running, even without the Glowy Rod of Doomful Power she was waving around. Her eyes lit up when she saw Buffy looking at her, and she practically preened.  
  
_Melodrama queen much?_ Where Buffy had redone her conquer-all gauntlet and kill-the-world booties in basic black with gold accents for style, Tyra seemed to have taken her cue from Evil Overlords Monthly. The spikes were mostly gone, at least, but she’d done the whole chestplate in bloody red, bone white and royal purple - gaudy didn’t begin to cover it, even if it had a certain neo-Roman snap. The same pattern of colors ran down to the solid red metal of the right gauntlet, which was lurid enough that it looked like she’d dipped her hand in gore, and ended abruptly just past the elbow of her left arm where Buffy’s own gauntlet would have ‘completed’ the ‘ensemble.’  
  
_She’s going to monologue. Nobody who wears that outfit and summons giant snakes is going to not monologue. Oh, God, am I going to have to listen to her monologue the whole time we’re trying to kill this thing? Eeeeevil._  
  
“Isn’t Azi gorgeous? I saw him in one of Rasha’s tomes and just had to summon him, and I have to say I’m so happy that I did. After he eats you and your little friends I might take him on tour. He’d enjoy that. International flavor fest.” Tyra waved the glowing doomstick exuberantly, lips spread in a nasty grin, then pointed. “That one, over there!”  
  
Akilah came out of nowhere and slammed into the chosen Hound, knocking her out of the way and into cover as one of the snake’s heads battered through a stall chasing her. Buffy lost track of them both, but the way Azi Dahaka kept rooting around in the rubble was a positive. Probably meant it wasn’t feasting on somebody. She could just barely see Satsu and Elena hacking away at the back quarter of the tail between hails of flying splinters, which was also good signage. People who were hacking at snake weren't cowering in fear and/or dead.  
  
Tyra was still talking. Buffy wondered - between dodging snakebites - if she actually thought anybody was listening or just liked the sound of her own voice. “You know, I was going to kill you slowly because you’ve been such a pain in the ass, but watching you scurry around and hide like a rat is kinda cute. Maybe I’ll keep you around for funsies. I bet I could make you and the snobby Slayers--the new girls who don’t see the beauty of my rule--fight to the death. _That_ would be fun. Gladiatorial deathmatches are so underrated.”  
  
Make that Evil Overlords Monthly, Megalomania Today, _and_ the Journal of Historical Nutjobs.  
  
“Speaking of death and stubborn young things, I bet that uppity sister of yours is bleeding out from her throat right about now. I didn’t think it would be that easy to separate you two, but I guess I overestimated your strategic thinking. Thanks for the gorget, by the way. It’s going to come in very handy for me. I was kinda worried that you’d stick it on that girl who was backing you up in Rome, but I guess she’s just window dressing. _Useful_ window dressing. Kinda unstable, but I like that - keeps things exciting. I think she’d make a good addition to the club, but Rasha says she’s real stubborn. Pity. Maybe _I_ can stick the gorget on her - that could be fun. When you’re all nicely beaten and I’m done with watching Rasha torture you all, I’ll think about it. The _things_ my darkself can do with a knife you’ll just have to see to believe, but we’ll get to that part after I’ve got my armor.”  
  
_Dawn_ . Buffy faltered for several steps before her fighting instincts managed to grab her panic by the elbow and quickly usher it into a side room in her brain. _Either it’s a feint or there’s nothing you can do about it, and you can’t leave a giant snake demon roaming free.  
_  
She simply wouldn’t let herself consider the other things. They were going to win this, not least because if crazy was a competitive sport Tyra would have won the gold several times by now. Buffy decided she’d had enough. Sprinting around an obstacle course of crushed stalls and alleyways, she angled towards the base of the minaret.  
  
“I mean, I _will_ have all the armor eventually. There’s only a little bit left, and then I can take the rest off your broken body. By then you’ll see that you really should have used it for its true purpose if you wanted to keep it. I can already tell it likes me better - no surprise, really. I mean, what good is a girl who couldn’t even keep her own darkself with her? Twice, even. Lame.”  
  
Buffy burst out of cover to stand in front of the tower. Turning to face the demon, she waved her arms wildly, calling to it. “Hey, six-eyes, over here! Come and get me!”  
  
Azi Dahaka reared, hissing, and dove to strike.  
  
At the last millisecond, Buffy threw herself to the side, and even rolling through a few chunks of debris she could have avoided as she allowed herself a grin - there was nothing quite like the sound of several tons of snake running head-on into a building that had never been intended to take heavy sideways blows. _Which makes twice in my life I’ve gotten to hear it. I think I might need to rethink my life choices... but not today._  
  
Tyra tumbled and bounced her way through a hail of masonry, cursing eloquently and with considerable volume as the minaret fell soundly on top of the snake in question. It wobbled its heads from side to side for a good minute, obviously dazed, then turned and growled at her with all three heads at once.  
  
_Right. Got its attention. That was the plan, right? Right. So there is no reason at all to panic other than the three-headed demon snake-god which is now seriously pissed with me. Running. Running would be good._  
  
Her legs agreed, vigorously. In fact, they started without her.  
  
“Faith,” she panted into her mic as she hurdled a broken tent and headed for the water, “tell me I don’t need a plan B, because I do not in fact have a plan B and I am feeling decidedly crunchy-delicious.”  
  
“Wow,” the radio bud in her right ear piped up in what sounded remarkably like Faith’s voice but was clearly not, because if it had been Faith sounding that calm at this moment she would have had to kill her later, “it’s certainly big. And gaining.”  
  
“Kill you,” she panted as another rush of adrenaline pushed her legs faster towards the bridge, “so hard. Are we flame-ready or not?”  
  
“You tried that already, remember? Anyway, we’re... ready-ish. Ready like, even. Do you think this mystical whosit requires you to set it on fire yourself, or can I set it on fire and you stab it?”  
  
Buffy was almost to the double-layered bridge, all the shops on the bottom level cheerfully lit, the cars and pedestrians by now only traveling away from the market on the top level. For a few seconds more of frantic dashing, she was seriously contemplating all the ways she was going to murder her soon-to-be-ex-second-in-command, and then she caught the rainbow sheen of oil on the water and her feet grew wings. “I don’t think I have a light, Faith.”  
  
“Gotcha covered, B.” The words were in her radio and her ears at once, and a dark-haired flash of motion cut across her track. It was amazing the details adrenaline would etch into your memory - Faith’s hair streaming in the cold sea wind, her skin glittering with streetlight reflected off sweat, the silver flash of a half-covered vambrace as her right hand came up and threw. The metal sparkle of the lighter tumbling in mid-air, a perfect parabolic arc.  
  
Buffy caught it out of the air, leapt onto the rail of the bridge and quipped - not because she had time, but because she didn’t. That was a thing about being a Slayer - you always quipped when you didn’t have time. It didn’t sound like something the Watchers would have built in, and the Primitive had never seemed like the quippy sort. Part of her wondered where it had come into the line.  
  
Another part was busy screaming about the giant snake that was almost on top of her, but quippy won over screaming. Bonus points for cool. “So, fate. Never big on that. Call this an impromptu rewrite.”  
  
It seemed to have learned something, or possibly not to be used to snarky meals, because this time it hesitated and eyeballed the Slayer and her surroundings critically. After a moment it seemed to regain its snakey confidence, and as its three heads pulled back to strike, Buffy dove headfirst over the railing.  
  
As she fell she grabbed one of the decorative hangings anchored to the base of the top level and twisted a leg around it for a better hold. Swinging back and forth over water and the lower level of the bridge for a few moments, she avoided the wave that briefly swamped the floor beneath her as Azi Dahaka dove into the inlet.  
  
Flicking the lighter open, she waited until the monster surfaced, hissing and sputtering and conveniently oily. She blew it a kiss, threw the lighter at it and prayed it caught fire.  
  
Apparently, she had not yet entirely overdrawn whatever account she stored her luck in, because it caught fire _marvelously_ . Screaming, thrashing, burning snake-kebab. Well, without the kebab, but you couldn’t have everything. It made a snap for her, teeth scraping on the old stone and metal framework of the bridge, and she chopped the thing in the neck with the Scythe by way of encouraging it to just be a dear and die already.    
  
It took it a while and three or four more shots with the Scythe to get the hint, but it did finally get it.  
  
Unwinding her legs, she dropped safely, if roughly, to the floor of what had been a charming little restaurant and was now covered in seawater, heating oil and two gigantic snake heads, the third having done the considerate thing and sunk with the rest of the body. Getting painfully to her feet and cursing her adrenaline for leaving as soon as the fun was over, she stared at the mess, then at the Scythe, and wondered if she should just leave or chop up the remainders and toss them in the water.  
  
_Dawn_. Combat reflexes and shock wore off enough for her to brain to begin reassembling priorities more long-term than ‘don’t die.’ Snake kibble and the unlikely-to-work-out Chase Tyra Detail were other-people things. Running as fast as she could to her sister’s rescue and chopping an ex-Slayer turned vampire into bits was a job for her. Just as soon as she could walk in a straight line.  
  
Faith was close - picking a careful track across across the soggy mess of the lower bridge toward her, ducking burning beams and broken rivets. Watching her back, as always. Ready to run wherever she led.  
  
They were going to need to run damn fast, this time.  
  
_Dawn_.  
  
A few yards away, the Golden Horn guttered and danced like a madman’s bonfire.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes blood, multiple character deaths and some very serious violence. If this is a serious problem for you or likely to be triggering, you may want to skip it.

The safehouse was a small brick building buried in the heart of Bakırköy - an upscale, crowded area perfect for getting lost in, with easy access to the Ataturk International Airport and excellent public transportation.  Every one of the nineteen kilometers it had required for them to get there from the looted church had been a quiet agony, until Jasna had been driven almost to snarling at the bus driver who had provided the last leg of their journey. It was Sidik who had been her calm center, the gentle hand on her arm when restraint was required, the silent reminder that their charge was not so many years older than they were and far less familiar with the territory. No matter how desperately she wanted to discharge her duty and return to her Captain’s side, a display of temper would undermine any sense of security the Watcher might have.  
  
Dawn Summers had surprised her.  That had been the one relief of the night - the girl was quick, quiet, spoke excellent Arabic and was in good physical condition. Not enough to keep up with three Slayers pumping a hell of an adrenaline high, but enough that she’d cost them bare minutes over the course of their run. She was winded now, of course, pale and half-exhausted despite the twenty minute bus ride to recoup herself, but Jasna could hardly blame her for that. The Watcher had held up in the crunch, and that was what mattered. They were practically inside the safehouse, now, and that meant they could relax.  
  
Ariel still had the box and Sidik was on close protection for Dawn, which left it to Jasna to pop the door and check the safehouse. She worked her way through it front to back - living room, kitchen with the back door, bathrooms, two bedrooms (one set up as an arsenal, the other with a full set of bunkbeds), the small safe room in the back with its array of protective wards. She stopped to run her fingers along the small wood plaque that marked it as a shared home, reinforcing that layer of defense reflexively, then circled back to the front door and gave the all-clear signal to Sidik and Ariel. “Let’s get settled. Once we’re secure, I’ll call in for news.”  
  
The Watcher heaved a sigh of relief, running a hand through her sweat-damp hair. “I need a shower. Does anybody else need a shower?”  
  
“I could shower.” Ariel let Sidik pass her through the door, shifting the box with the gorget inside to her left hand so she could flex her right. The shift of the muscles made her wince. “This thing’s heavier than it looks.”  
  
“The water must be run a few minutes before it will warm - best to wait so your muscles will not knot.” Sidik vanished into the kitchen, reappearing with three bottles of water in one hand and a bottle of asprin in the other. “ _Amīrah,_ Akilah insists I remind you not to shower cold or you will make your knee worse.”  
  
“Akilah worries too much.” Jasna reached for one of the bottles, suddenly aware of her parched throat. “Ariel, come in and shut the door before you let every insect in the quarter inside.”  
  
Ariel didn’t answer for two long heartbeats - just long enough for Jasna’s irritation to flare up and for her to start a complaint - and then the ghastly, choking sound from just inside the door spun her around with a hand already dropping toward the stake in her shoulderbag. The streetlights outside cast Ariel in golden silhouette. Shadowed the wide agonized pain in her blue eyes into near invisibility.  
  
Glittered off the silver edge of the knife in her throat and the red splash of blood soaking her shirt.  
  
Jasna had shared barely any time at all with Ariel O’Donnell in the time she’d spent training in London - long enough to know the hard Ulster brogue of her voice. Long enough to know she had a scar on her right shoulder she wouldn’t talk about and a love for fast motorcycles she wouldn’t stop talking about. Long enough to know she was deadly with a sword, quick on the draw with a stake and hated Asian foods because the spice made her stomach hurt. Long enough to hear her complain about the mousy librarian Watcher-in-Training who the Captain spent too much time mothering. Long enough to know she was tough and proud of it.  
  
The last acts of Ariel O’Donnell’s life were to throw the box in her hand to Jasna Biaram, and to turn to face her murderer. To buy time for two Slayers she barely knew and a Watcher she didn’t much like.  
  
It took three more knives before she went down and stayed down, crumpled across the steps of the safehouse like a broken doll.  
  
Jasna and Sidik were already moving, then, already taking up flanking positions on the door. Jasna might have yelled for Dawn to run - if the words left her, they came and went unnoticed in the sudden red-flame heat of her rage. It took all her training to fight down the urge to charge out into that street and... and likely get herself killed. Sidik hit the back of the door, hard, and cut off that option with the flat booming finality of the heavy oak rattling against its frame and the automatic locks clicking shut.  
  
The silence was abrupt and terrifying, broken only by the slow awful sounds of Ariel’s dying moments outside the door, and Jasna made herself take three long breaths - made herself ignore the smell of blood and death in the air - so she could focus. So she could think.  
  
_Rasha._ She remembered the name from her briefing. The photocopy of a sketch. _Slayer. Vampire. Something in-between. Followed us? Waiting in ambush? No, it would have struck sooner if it had been waiting. Following at a distance. Allah’s mercy, Ariel... no. No time. Think. Alone? Probably - almost certainly. One could slip past us, slip up behind us. Many? No. One._  
  
“She is a vampire, _amīrah._ Without an invitation, she - _it_ \- cannot pass.” Sidik’s breathing was coming deep and steady, just like she was trained to - just like they’d both been trained to - but the measure of her tension was that the words came out fast and urgent in Arabic instead of English. If Ariel had still been alive, it would have been a mistake. “The windows are barred. The building will not burn. We will be safe.”  
  
It made sense. It had to make sense. Vampires were creatures of rules, of rituals, and they had the advantage of this one. It had come too late, struck too late. Ariel had saved the box and their mission.  
  
The dread at the back of her throat refused to go away.  
  
The lock on the back door gave out with a sickening crunch of wood, and she was turning toward it before the sound even finished reaching her ears, hurling the stake in her right hand at the doorway into the kitchen and diving for the axe on the coffee table in the same motion. A blur of shadows and dusk-pale skin and dark silk flashed under the stake, mirroring the same diving motion and hurling a dagger that buried itself two inches into the doorframe where Jasna’s own head had been a moment before, and she could see Sidik reacting as well - vaulting the low couch, her stake ready in her hand.  
  
The axe haft slapped Jasna’s palm raw, the coffee table tumbling over and smashing its cheap inlaid surface against the carpet, and she had to roll to dodge another flashing knife that missed her by inches. Had to take her eyes off the vampire who had entered their home uninvited and killed one of them already.  
  
She didn’t know where Dawn Summers was, and she didn’t know where the box was, and it came to Jasna as she broke out of the roll and saw Sidik down on the floor of the hall, blood soaking her _abaya_ , that it was possible she was about to fail the mission she’d been given. Fail her Captain. The thought enraged her.  
  
_No._  
  
Her axe met the parry of the pale demon’s knives and smashed them aside, hacked through expensive cloth and dead flesh to lay the creature that looked like a woman’s left side open, and then the weapon was gone - snatched away and snapped in half by a dead hand. She pulled one of the daggers from the wall and went in again - fast, desperate, not thinking about the moves anymore but just trusting her training. Trusting the warrior who had taught her to handle herself in alleys not much wider than this, to hold off vampires by the half-dozen, to fight and to fight and to never give up. Trusting Faith.  
  
The creature broke her left wrist, three of her ribs, something in her right shoulder - she felt it give, felt the grate of bone and twisted muscle, but the arm was still useable. She cut it a dozen times, battered its head through the wall, did something to the knee of its left leg that nearly dropped it to the floor. Dislocated its left shoulder. Cut its forehead to fill its eyes with blood.  
  
Rasha kept coming.  
  
The moment she knew - _knew_ \- she had the monster beaten was when it threw her to the floor and she felt the broken wood haft of the axe under her hand. She let it take a step back, let it open its mouth to gloat, and then came up off the floor in a lunge driven by her left hand that laced her whole body with agony but gave her exactly the angle she needed. Stake to the heart. Perfect.  
  
It was a fractional side-step - barely a whisper of movement, almost too fast to see - but it was enough. Enough to let the stake punch deep into the creature’s useless right lung instead. Enough to let its right hand come up fast with a knife and drive the point six inches up under Jasna’s ribs.  
  
Enough to lose her the fight.  
  
The vampire had her now, and knew it. Knew it well enough to take particular pleasure in breaking her hand, snapping both her legs above the knee and slamming her in the throat hard enough to half-ruin her windpipe.  
  
She slid down the wall, choking on her own blood, and Rasha turned away. Laughed like the monster it - she - was, face still contorted into a fanged, monstrous parody of humanity. Stalked down the wall, away from her. Toward Sidik.  
  
Pain and the choking spasms in her throat were filling Jasna’s eyes with tears, but she could still see the outline of Rasha’s body when the vampire stopped in the hall and hissed like an enraged viper. Could still feel a small thrill of satisfaction through the pain at the frustration in the vampire’s unnatural voice. “Come out of there, my pretty, or I’ll come in to get you.”  
  
“No.” Dawn Summers’ voice shook with fear and anger of her own, but there was courage and determination like adamant in it. “I don’t think you will. And I don’t think your little knives are gonna do you much good either - I’m pretty sure that’s a ward against outside violence I’m looking at hanging over the door.”  
  
_The safe room._ Dull, cool relief rolled over Jasna’s body, smothering more of the pain. _Everything our Watcher and the shamans could layer into it. Protected. She’s protected._  
  
Rasha laughed again, though this time it had the hard edge of a probing knife and not a hint of real humor. “Shall we test that, little Watcher?”  
  
“Oh, look. Beads of Orakan.” Dawn matched the laugh with one of her own - young, brittle and bitter, but edged with relief of her own. “An invitation to anywhere and everywhere that’s not going to help a bit against a warding circle. Like the one I’m sitting in. You’re busted and you know it, if you’re still here when my sister gets here, she’s going to kill your sorry immortal Iberian ass.”  
  
Rasha snarled, and Jasna closed her eyes in relief. She knew that sound, knew it from a dozen fights with vampires. _Beaten. Beaten and forced to retreat._  
  
By the time she could open them again, the hall was empty except for the the light spilling from the safe room. Her skin was cold, and her throat was raw, and she was dying for a drink of water.  
  
_Dying._ Bruised lips twitched at the humor of it. Sidik would appreciate that.  
  
_Sidik._  
  
Duty tried to move her, to push her to sit up and look, but the pain held her down and forced a cry out of her.  
  
“Jasna?! God, Jasna, are you still alive? Hold on - I’m coming out!” The Watcher’s voice. Dawn’s voice.  
  
“No.” Her own voice rasped brokenly in her throat, but she made herself take the pain to be heard. To be clear. “No. She could still come back. Where is Sidik? The box?”  
  
“I pulled her in here. With me. She’s hurt - I think she’s in shock - but she’s going to be okay. I stopped the bleeding. I don’t know where the gorget is - I think Rasha took it. Jasna, you’re bleeding. You’re bleeding really bad. If I don’t get out there and stop it....”  
  
“No.” She put everything she had left into the word. After a few seconds, the blur she was almost certain was Dawn Summers sat back down inside the wards.  
  
“Okay. Okay. God, Jasna, there’s so much blood.... I texted Faith and Buffy. They’re coming. They’re coming, okay? You just have to hold on.”  
  
_Coming. Good._ She tried to take another breath, choked half of it down with a chaser of her own blood and decided the next was probably going to be too much trouble. There was hardly any pain now, and her brain was trying to tell her that was a bad sign - body shutting down. She knew better. Less pain was good, for what was left.  
  
“Dawn.” A little breath at a time. Quietly. It was like pushing hands in training - a little force at a time, smoothly, so you didn’t break the pattern. “Take care of Sidik. Tell the Captain what happened. Tell her....” She stopped, because the words weren’t there and she couldn’t waste the breath to fumble. There were right words.  
  
She had a little time. Enough.  
  
“Tell her _assalamu Alaikom warahmatu Allahi wa barakatuhu._ You understand?”  
  
“I understand.” Dawn’s voice broke, but the words were very clear.  
  
“Good.” She held the word in her mouth a moment.  Felt the dull distant ache of her lungs. Closed her own eyes.  
  
Stopped.


	10. Chapter 10

The soft, broken cry of pain that tore itself out of D’s throat as the pack of Slayers moved in on the safehouse was too raw for professionalism or discipline to contain - too intimate, too personal. The African Slayer broke ranks and ran for the crumbled shape laid out across the stairs, Satsu only a few steps behind her, and Faith’s soft curse as the careful silence of their approach came apart was almost lost in the sudden ripple of weapons being unsheathed and boots on the pavement.   
  
So much for subtlety.  
  
Buffy found the Scythe in her hand again, muscles suddenly ready to fight, the night suddenly clearer around her. Thank God for adrenaline. The first surge had worn off part way through their long bus ride to the safehouse--she made a mental note to make Giles sign off on a car for the local girls--and as battered and exhausted as she felt, she knew she’d need the chemical assistance.  
  
Not a problem for the moment. Faith was giving curt orders to the team, assigning a team of four to establish a perimeter and two more to carry Ariel’s body inside - D and Satsu, by unspoken agreement, which was just as well given the tears on D’s face and the way Satsu’s hands were shaking. Whatever else Buffy could say about Rasha - and at the moment the list was anything but flattering - the monster had a positively Angelus-like knack for taking people out of the fight emotionally. The girls were tough - she knew that - but she knew what it was like to get kicked in the soul that way, too, and she was just as glad Faith was giving them a moment to recover.   
  
Buffy, Faith, Akilah and Kadriye would clear the building first - it hadn’t been said aloud, but the local girls knew the building and that might make a difference. Besides, if she was honest, trying to hold them back when Jasna and Sidik were still unaccounted for was trouble they didn’t need right now. No,  trouble was something they’d be saving for the undead relic of the Inquisition if she was still inside. The easy give of the door was all that saved it from being smashed down when Faith kicked it, and the four of them were inside before the last of the breath had left Buffy’s lungs.   
  
The swallow of fresh air she choked down when knives failed to flash out of the broken shadows of the room to meet them was thick enough with blood that she could almost taste it.   
  
Flipping on the lights, Buffy’s eyes were involuntarily drawn to the smear of blood visible on the wall of the hallway that led to the back of the house, the pool of blood below it thick enough to stand on top of the saturated carpet, and Jasna’s broken, still body lying in the middle of it.  She looked long enough to determine that no, it wasn’t Dawn, and no, there was nothing anyone could do for her.   
  
“Dawn?” She followed her urgent call deeper into the house, checking the kitchen and then picking her way across the dead girl’s body as gingerly as she could. Behind her, she caught the low horrified cry of Akilah’s grief at the sight of her friend.  
  
Dawn’s exhausted, desperate voice reached out down the hall for her.“Buffy! We’re back here.”   
  
Buffy’s head snapped up, catching the Watcher’s pale, wide-eyed face around the edge of the open door at the end of the hall, and relief flooded her in a rush that tumbled her down the hall and brought her to her knees beside her sister with an arm around the younger girl’s shoulders.   
  
Or maybe that was the adrenaline wearing off again.   
  
“Buffy.” Dawn’s arms went around her, hard, and there was blood on her hands - enough to smear into Buffy’s shirt and ruin the garment thoroughly.  “Buffy, she was here - the vampire, she was here and she killed Ariel. She took the gorget, I’m sorry, I didn’t see where it went and I grabbed Sidik instead and then I couldn’t go out and look. Jasna... oh god, Buffy, there was so much blood. I think... I think she’s....”  
  
“Shh.” She stroked her sister’s hair with hands covered in masonry dust and bits of demon blood.  Nobody was going to care about getting dirty tonight.  _God_ . While Dawn’s face was buried in her shoulder, Buffy bit her lip, blinking back tears.  _Still the same dangerous job._   
  
Soothing Dawn’s shaking with comforting noises, Buffy noticed Sidik lying on the floor, breathing roughly and covered in impromptu bandages, some made from Dawn’s t-shirt, some from her own hijab.   
  
“Shh, Dawn. You saved Sidik. You did good. We’ll get the gorget back.”  Prying the Watcher’s arms loose, she stood, pulling her sister up with her. “Have you called anyone? We need to get her to a hospital.”  
  
“Texted you. I don’t have the number for their Watcher, and I didn’t know... she could still have been here. An ambulance could have gotten them all killed.” Dawn swallowed hard, still pale and drained, but she seemed to pull herself together with composure from somewhere inside Buffy was starting to realize wasn’t unusual for her. “Sidik’s not... it’s bad, bad enough to put her in shock, but she’ll be okay if we get her to a doctor tonight.”  
  
“I know a doctor.” Akilah’s voice was rusty and jagged with pain, her cheeks still wet with fresh tears, but she appeared at Buffy’s elbow almost silently and her jaw was set with rigid discipline. “I will call him and he will come.”  
  
Buffy nodded. Nine armed, dangerous, and furious Slayers should be enough to keep him from asking too many questions.   
  
Akilah sat on the floor next to Sidik, pulling her phone from her jacket pocket with one hand and running the other softly over the injured girl’s hair before straightening a torn section of black cloth to cover the brown strands of it as best she could. It was a small concession to Sidik’s modesty, but it was what she could do, and the quietly painful intimacy of the motion made Buffy’s heart ache.   
  
“What about Jasna?” Dawn’s voice carried the pleading note it often had when she was asking not for information, but in the desperate hope that her suspicions would be proved false.  
  
Buffy hated disappointing her.  
  
“She’s dead, Dawny.” Her voice had that awful, flat quality it always did when discussing terrible news. “Ariel’s dead too. Everyone else is tired and banged up but otherwise fine.”  
  
Dawn managed a nod, though if it was possible she went even paler, and her eyes were hollow with the fresh wave of pain. “She saved my life. She saved both our lives. I... I need to talk to Faith.”  
  
Swallowing, Buffy nodded, and they both returned to the horror in the living room.  
  
They’d laid Ariel out a few feet from Jasna, just out of the line of passage through the kitchen door Someone had taken a bedsheet and covered the Hound, and laid out towels on the carpet around the lead Slayer of Istanbul to try to soak up most of the blood. It was a pretty good job for three minutes, but a part of her brain wondered why nobody had tried to move Jasna yet. It seemed a little disrespectful, to leave her sitting there propped up against the wall like that. Then she got a good look at who was crouched on the towels next to Jasna, and understood.

  
Faith’s skin was still streaked with sweat and charcoal from the oily smoke of the burning river, her leather jacket and jeans dusted lightly with broken masonry, and there was dark blood on her blouse and soaked into her jeans, smeared across her hands and her right cheek. It was her eyes that stopped Buffy hard in her tracks, though - the cold emptiness there, and the pale grief that had drained anything resembling humanity out of the fine lines of her face. She leaned against the wall beside Jasna’s body with one hand, soaking blood into the drywall, and the other was tracing the bloody tangles of the girl’s hair away from the bruises on those dark cheeks with exacting care.   
  
Shit.  
  
She wanted to trust Faith. She wanted to believe that Faith was in firm, zen-master control of her darker impulses now. She really, really wanted to get through the next few days without having to use force to keep her own strongest ally on the wagon.   
  
Approaching the other Slayer slowly, Buffy cleared her throat a little before laying a gentle hand on Faith’s shoulder.   
  
“I sent her away.” Faith’s voice was a thing of ice and razors, so soft that even Buffy had to strain to hear it. “I sent her away in London, and I sent her away tonight, and she went because I was the one who was asking. Because I knew she’d get the job done, no matter what it cost...” her voice broke, just a little, and Buffy could hear an ocean of pain in that moment before the ice closed up again. Faith struggled for her breath, found it, visibly made herself finish. “No matter what it cost her.”  
  
Buffy felt a familiar sting in her eyes and gripped Faith’s shoulder so hard the leather creaked under her strength. She wanted to take all the light and warmth she had and melt Faith’s heart, bring her back to herself again, drown her grief in it. It looked like physical force was not going to be worth much tonight after all.   
  
Distantly aware of the tears rolling down her cheeks, Buffy knelt, arms wrapping around Faith’s shoulders. “It’s not your fault,” she murmured.   
  
“I sent her away, B.” Faith’s voice trembled, and she leaned down to wrap her own arms around the bloodied body of the girl without seeming to care how much of that blood soaked her. “All she wanted was to stay with me, and I sent her away. How the fuck is that not my fault?”  
  
Frowning slightly, Buffy kept a hand on her friend’s back. “Well, one, even if she’d stayed you couldn’t have been with her the whole time.” Keeping her voice soft, reasonable and not banging her head on the wall were good goals. Faith didn’t need her frustration. “Two, being with her wouldn’t have been a guarantee of safety for either of you. The demon was pretty dangerous.”   
  
“Not tonight.” Faith murmured the words into Jasna’s hair, her shoulders trembling with the emotion straining at the walls of her emotional armor. “London. Before she decided to come back to Istanbul.”  
  
Mouth open to speak, hand rubbing soothing circles on Faith’s back, Buffy suddenly froze. “I--oh.” Re-starting her brain, she scrubbed at her face with her free hand, shaking her head to try to clear it. She supposed it was entirely reasonable. Buffy had been away, and it’s not like they’d parted on fantastic terms, either. “The two of you were...together?”  
  
“No.” Faith eased back from the girl slowly, lifted a hand to stroke the cold bruised softness of her cheek, then leaned forward enough to press a bloodied kiss to Jasna’s forehead in a gesture as intimate as any lover’s. “No. We weren’t. She wanted to be. I wouldn’t let her. That’s why....” Her voice broke again, the icy control of it fragmenting around a fresh wave of grief.  
  
An odd static had started in Buffy’s head, like she couldn’t find a good wavelength for any of her emotions and everything was coming through scratchy. Leaning forward, she put both arms around Faith again. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry, Faith.”   
  
“I’m going to kill them.” Faith whispered the words in a raw, jagged voice that was too full of grief and pain for rage to find purchase - only an iron determination locked into her bones. “I’m going to kill both of them, B. I don’t care how long or how far I have to hunt them - that undead bitch and her boss are going to die hard.”  
  
The starkness of her grief worried Buffy. She found herself hugging Faith tight to herself, not caring about her cramping leg or the blood or any of it. “Yeah. They need to get dead.” Closing her eyes tight, her next words came out quietly but solid in their certainty. “I’ll be there with you, and I won’t let you jump off the wagon.” Leaning around the other Slayer’s shoulders, she didn’t say the rest until Faith looked her in the eyes. “You’re worth more than revenge, Faith.”  
  
Those dark, wounded brown eyes looked into hers for what felt like a long time - maybe it was just a few seconds, it was impossible to tell - and she couldn’t begin to read what was moving in their depths. There was too much there. Too much hurt, too much anger and loss, too much history between them.   
  
“She said to tell you what happened. She made me promise.” Dawn’s voice was as unsteady as Faith’s, but there was determination in it and when neither of the kneeling Slayers spoke she went on grimly. “Rasha surprised us - she killed Ariel first, before any of us knew she was there. Jasna told me to run for the safe room, got herself and Sidik under cover where they could reach the door. It was smart, exactly what they should have done. We didn’t know Rasha was carrying a set of the Beads of Orakan - they’re magical prayer-beads ritually soaked in the blood of a passageway demon. They let her break in the back door. I didn’t see most of what happened then, but Sidik went down. Hurt. I pulled her into the safe room with me, bandaged her as best I could. I know Jasna was fighting her - I didn’t see most of it, but I heard it. She held Rasha off long enough that we were safe. If I’d been able to find the box, pull it in with me....” Dawn broke off, her jaw working with frustration and tears of shame in her eyes, then made herself go on. “Rasha threatened me, but she couldn’t get in, and she left. Jasna wouldn’t let me come out to help her. She was hurt bad. I think she knew she wasn’t going to... I think she knew. She made me promise to tell you what happened, and to say... she said to tell you ' _assalamu Alaikom warahmatu Allahi wa barakatuhu.'_ It means....”  
  
“‘Peace be upon you, and Allah’s mercy and blessings.’” Faith murmured the words softly, tears in her eyes, and the emptiness of her face finally filled with a raw, human pain and loss as the first sob shook her. “She used to say it all the time when she first came to London.” Then the tears and the shaking stole her voice from her, and she pressed her bloodied face to Buffy’s shoulder to muffle her weeping.  
  
With her arms around Faith, the two getting tears and blood all over each other, Buffy felt something inside click. The static in her head was gone, and everything was suddenly close and terrible and real. She started sobbing herself, hands fisted in the other Slayer’s shirt, eyes screwed shut.  
  
They sat like that for a long time--by the time they’d both stopped crying, still kneeling spent in each other’s arms, the doctor had arrived, examined Sidik, and left for the hospital with his patient. Akilah and most of her survivors had gone as well, leaving only Faith and the Summers girls and the Slayers on perimeter duty, and the quiet and the bodies made the once-inviting living room feel like a crypt. Buffy tried to fill the stillness.   
  
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you have a good cry.”  
  
Faith’s laugh was soft and pained and rusty, but her own again. “It’s never really been my mode of catharsis, B.” She trembled again, but the tears didn’t return, and she finally pushed herself off her knees and out of Buffy’s arms. She gathered Jasna’s body in her arms again with careful tenderness, carried the girl the few feet needed to lay her beside Ariel, and then drew the sheet across her with hands that were almost steady. She knelt there a few seconds more, then straightened up and squared her shoulders before turning away. “I’m ready to go now,” she said to no-one in particular. “We’ve got work to do.”   
  
“We could stay long enough to bury her,” Dawn offered softly, but Faith answered her with a sharp shake of her head.   
  
“Her people should do it.” The dark-haired Slayer’s voice was calm, but there was a bleakness in her eyes that would have broken a stone’s heart. “None of us have the right.”


	11. Chapter 11

The terrace of the Four Seasons Istanbul was beautiful at night, the Hagia Sophia looming behind in blue and white lighting, the square below alive with music and talk even this late. A single table was set with white linens, silver, and crystal while candles flickered warmly in various corners. Tyra saw none of it. She stood with both hands on the stone balustrade, tension in her shoulders, glaring out into the night. Scratches in the granite appeared unnoticed under the stilettos of her gauntleted fingers - she was envisioning ripping Buffy’s eyes out, and her fingers worked in an anticipatory echo of her line of thought.  
  
A polite cough sounded behind her. She knew the waitress had been there for a few minutes, of course. A single stupid mortal could hardly surprise her.   
  
The servant decided to press her luck. “Excuse me, madam?”   
  
Tyra whirled, advancing on the young woman. The girl stood there, as nervous as a bird with a tea tray, and only looked more and more disconcerted as Tyra got closer. She didn't run away yet, though - that was the way birds were with snakes. So many pretty colors and so much adrenaline that their poor little brains didn't know which way to jump.  
  
The Slayer grinned.  
  
“I’d  _love_ some tea,” she gushed, putting on her human mask. That was always fun. “What’s your name, miss?”  
  
“Sevda, madam,” the girl almost whispered as she set the tray down and began pouring.  Tyra watched her, wondering for the hundredth time if her hunger for blood and pain felt anything like Rasha’s.    
  
Shaking her head, she immediately broke that strand of thought. Worry was much less fun than violence.  
  
The girl set the teacup on the table near Tyra’s wine glass, hand shaking. A look of something between shame and terror flew across her dark features and she clutched both hands together. “The food will be ready shortly, madam. Is there anything else you desire?”  
  
Taking a long swallow of tea, eyes locked on the waitress’s, Tyra set it down gently in the saucer before letting her mask drop.   
  
“Sevda. Of course there are other things I desire.” Picking up a silver knife, she twirled it around her fingers, watching the blood drain from the girl’s face. “I want that bitch dead, for one thing. I mean, how dare she?” The force of her rage seized hold of her and she swept up and out of her chair, closing in on her audience. “How  _dare_ that tool, that  _whore_ kill my baby?  _My_ Azi. It took time and power to summon him, after all. And he was so wonderful.” The waitress was backing away slowly. That wouldn’t do.  
  
Grabbing the girl’s arm, Tyra threw her to the floor with enough force to crack some of the sandstone tiles. “Nobody leaves while I’m talking to them, Sevda!” Well, that was a little embarrassing, screaming at a stupid waitress. It was definitely the stress of the bad evening. “Nobody.”    
  
The girl stammered an apology, and Tyra smiled again. “Now, that’s more like it.” She sipped at the tea, watching the girl wobble to her feet and then stay put. “What I want, Sevda, is revenge. Bloody, painful, terminal revenge. Long, too. Can’t have her die before I’m done making her scream.” The waitress’s eyes were wide with horror, now.   
  
That was kind of soothing. Maybe she should do this more often.  
  
“I’ll get her sister, that other Slayer she’s handsy with, maybe the witch and the old guy too, if I’m feeling industrious. Probably would be better to get them out of the way anyway. They’d probably try to fuck up my plans, too. Could be fun to try out all sorts of torture techniques.”    
  
Sevda was the color of bleached white rice paper. Probably the shock of seeing Tyra in her true glory. She tended to have that effect on people. The ones who lived long enough, anyway.  
  
The girl was going to try to run. Silly. Tyra could stop her before she got three steps.   
  
Actually, she stopped her within two. A swift downward crush with her heel, and the girl’s leg snapped like a piece of firewood. Clamping her right hand over the girl’s mouth, Tyra glared. “Shhh. There. I told you not to leave, Sevda. Now be quiet. You don’t want to get me mad again, do you?” The girl shook her head. When Tyra took her armored hand away, five short, shallow cuts seeped blood onto the girl’s cheek. Returning to her tea, Tyra ignored the girl’s whimpering. The noise would get tiresome if she let it go on too long, but for the moment it was tolerable enough.   
  
She’d get to that. Right now she was envisioning the way Buffy would sound begging for that tough little brunette’s life. It would probably start sounding dignified, but it wouldn’t  stay that way - not when she really got going. That was the thing about really good art. The audience just couldn’t  help but get involved.  
  
Tyra paused in mid-fantasy and frowned. The girl’s whimpering had stopped.  _If she’s tried to crawl off,_ she promised herself with a little growl of irritation,  _I’m definitely going to start with her hands...._   
  
Rasha was the only person - if that was the word - who still regularly snuck up on Tyra. It should have been an irritation, and sometimes it was, but at moments like this every one of those little barbs was worthwhile for the moment of unanticipated pleasure. The girl was a trembling, pale, desperate arch between Rasha’s right hand at the back of her neck and Rasha’s left at her hip, impaled on the dark wells of the vampire’s eyes as she lay across the kneeling ancient like an offering. Slender, weak,  _mortal_ fingers fluttered at the edge of the black silk scarf that had escaped its modest knot around Rasha’s hair to mingle with the spilled ebony curls and wavy strands framing the vampire’s face. It was a gorgeous, perverse and perfect echo of intimacy, the embrace before consummation.  
  
There was a stark cut across Rasha’s forehead and a hint of stiffness to her shoulders, a thick scent of blood to the modest silk blouse that was shredded and torn at the left side where the hooded cloak Rasha had donned for the night’s work didn’t fully cover it, two visible slashes that were still bleeding slowly into the savaged cloth over her left thigh.   
  
“Rasha!” Tea, fantasies and waitress forgotten, Tyra flew to her darkself’s side, gently pulling the scarf away from the vampire’s face. “My precious monster, what did those bitches do to you?” Running her naked hand through the vampire’s hair and checking for blood, she began to examine every inch of her lover’s body.  
  
It required spilling the damned waitress on the floor, but that was supremely unimportant for the moment.  
  
“Mere nothings, my love.” Rasha’s eyes were bloodily damp with something deeper than pain, and she bowed her head to Tyra’s shoulder and whispered her confession. “Your enemy’s sister lives. I failed to kill her for you - only three Slayers of little import.”  
  
“Shh.” Tyra pressed a kiss to the cut on the vampire’s forehead, licking up a little of the blood. “I want to torture them together anyway. She killed Azi. So beautiful and he only had a few hours on this plane. What a fucking waste.”  The Slayer’s fingers found a wet mess on Rasha’s left side, her hand coming away dripping in blood. “Shit, did they get you with an axe?” Concern etching the lines of her face, she grabbed Sevda by the high collar of her uniform and hauled her up to Rasha’s lips. “Here, drink. I hate seeing you like this.”  
  
“Local girl. Stubborn. I left her choking on her own ruined throat.” Rasha bent her head with a soft moan, burying her fangs in the waitress’s throat, and for a long two or three minutes the only sounds in the room were the vampire’s soft growls and Sevda’s increasingly desperate, quiet whimpers. They both trickled off into silence, at last, and the cool of Rasha’s body against Tyra’s fingers warmed with borrowed heat as skin and muscle and bone knitted themselves together again. Rasha stayed curved into the half-embrace for another few seconds before she let the girl fall, letting Tyra savor the fresh strength pulsing through her, and then reached out behind her and produced a small iron box. “But I brought you something, my love.”  
  
A fierce joy sang though Tyra and armor alike, and the Slayer forgot even her darkself as she dug red claws into the lid and tore it off with a creak of protesting metal. The gorget was packed with ancient, ritually-grown straw that blew to nothing in the night air and left a sheen of dust on the rusted iron spikes of the piece. Caressing the surface with both hands, Tyra smiled at the feeling of supplication coming from the gorget. It was all too happy to shape itself to her will, smoothing the spikes and rust into gleaming whorls of blood-red, bone white and royal purple.  
  
The Slayer knew it could do more than just look pretty. Looking up from her handiwork, she pulled Rasha’s hair and clothes away from her throat.  
  
She looked the vampire steadily in her lightless eyes.  “Are you ready to bind yourself to me?”  
  
Rasha had no breath to catch, but the delicate shudder that ran through her sleek frame was every bit as eloquent.  Her voice was a soft and husky thing, rich with tangled emotion, but there was no hesitation in those eyes. “I have been bound to you since the moment I laid eyes on you, my incomparable and blood-soaked goddess of death.”  
  
A warm laugh danced in her throat, a touch of her gauntlet opening the gorget along the invisible hinge, and she straightened to her feet in a reflexive, almost preening acknowledgement of her darkself’s worship. “Of course, my Dragon. I mean with this. We’ll be together even when we’re not.”  Holding the neck piece in her naked hand, Tyra pushed the point of her clawed index finger into her own bottom lip, the blood almost invisible against the lacquer.  To her own surprise, she felt her eyes sting with the intensity of her emotion.  
  
“Rasha de Leon, I swear by my strength and my blood to keep you, kill for you, and hunt with you by my side as long as I walk this earth.”   
  
Rasha shifted up into a full, ceremonial kneel worthy of any knight before her liege, and she lifted a hand still stained with the blood of her lady’s enemies to her lips as she fitted thought and voice alike to the gravity of the moment with all the vast and ancient majesty of long-vanished ages. “Tyra Celeste Morgan, I offer my strength and my blood to your service. Your enemies will be my enemies, your conquests will be my joy and your vengeance will be the work of my hands from this moment until the hour of my final death.”  
  
The Slayer’s chest tightened to see Rasha proclaim her fealty so touchingly. It was perfect. Her enemies would only have wasted the power and beauty of the armor. How could they understand the bond between her and her darkself?  
  
They couldn’t, and now, they never would.   
  
Rasha held her long hair back as Tyra closed the gorget around the vampire’s pale, graceful neck. With a touch of her fingers, the metal became a solid piece, to be removed by her hand alone.   
  
A rush of emotion and sensation overwhelmed the Slayer, and she dropped to one knee, hands on Rasha’s shoulders for support. The ache of old wounds throbbed in her left side, shoulder and thigh, wounds she had never sustained; fresh pain blossomed against her collarbone where claws sharp as razors dug into her flesh; a feeling of sated hunger burned in her belly, telling her she would soon need to feed again. Above it all, singing like a descant of humming steel, she felt a deep, ancient and powerful joy.    
  
“Oh,” she breathed against her lover’s cheek. “That’s you.”  
  
Strong arms - nearly as strong as her own - enfolded her, molding to the armor as if it were her own flesh, and she tasted Rasha’s awe-struck worship in the back of her own mouth as the echo of her own thoughts poured into the void of her darkself’s absent soul. “My love,” that dark harmony of a voice whispered into her skin, “I could not have imagined anything more beautiful than your eyes in the moment of slaughter. Now I know they are only the pale shadow of you.”  
  
A thrill of pleasure at Rasha’s praise ran through the both of them, and Tyra laughed. “And I thought you were sexiest when feeding, but now I can taste the waitress and feel her life animating you and it’s  _ glorious. _ ” Pulling the vampire-- _her_ vampire--closer, the Slayer caught her lover’s mouth in her own and bit it bloody.  
  
 _ My love, we are one.   
  
Now we only need to torture Buffy Summers and her little friends to death, _ one or the other or perhaps even both of them thought,  _and the world will be absolutely perfect._


	12. Chapter 12

Tray of various dishes from the dining car in her hands, Buffy had to use her shoulder to knock on the door to Faith’s compartment. It was a little awkward, but she managed a respectably solid thump each time. “Faith? I know it’s not a good time but a girl’s gotta eat.” She waited a moment. Silence.  
  
“I have a fried chicken sandwich, and curry something, and I don’t even know what’s in this other thing but it smells delicious.” Another pause. Still no answer.  
  
“Mmm, sandwich.” She used her best wheedling voice, the one she’d perfected when Dawn had been a petulant teenager. “Delicious, familiar, comforting fried meat sandwich.”  
  
Buffy perked up when she heard a noise that she thought meant Faith was getting up to open the door, then deflated when it turned out to be someone in the next compartment.  
  
“Faith! Please. Eat something.” Sighing, Buffy thumped her forehead against the door and left it there. “Slaying on an empty stomach is no fun. Plus you get all cranky when you’re hungry.”  
  
There was the loud, sharp and highly distinctive sound of one of Faith’s boots hitting the door. “Go away,” the muffled voice from inside the cabin protested. “I’m not hungry and you’re not funny.”  
  
The blonde rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you ate? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it was dinner last night. Like,” she paused to calculate, “Sixteen hours ago. And then we ran across Istanbul, killed a giant snake, and ran back across the city again. So unless you have a documented illness that requires fasting, I’m coming in there and you’re eating something if I have to force-feed you.”  
  
“I’ll fight you off,” Faith muttered from the other side of the door, but it was half-hearted at best. “I’ve done it before. Like, twice.”  
  
The lock clicked open.  
  
To no one’s surprise, the compartment’s lights were off and the shade was drawn over the window, just right for brooding. Buffy moved to flick on the lights, but stopped at Faith’s anticipatory flinch. “Yeah, why not, not like we can’t see.” Plunking herself and the tray down on the empty berth across from the tangle of blankets that was Faith’s, she elbowed the door shut. “So. Pick something. I liked the sandwich, Dawn thought the Mystery Meal was pretty good, and she said you got a taste for curry in London.”  
  
“Dawn is a wicked traitor who is going to pay for selling you information like that.” Faith looked … well, not as bad as Buffy had seen her look, but considering that that mental file included coma-Faith, crazy-evil-Faith and repentant-breakdown Faith, it wasn’t a comforting thought. There were dark circles under the other Slayer’s eyes, and coupled with the extra starkness that slayage and short rations always seemed to give her it made her look positively gaunt. “I really mean it about not being hungry.”  
  
“Too bad,” Buffy said briskly, holding out the bowl of curry. Ten seconds of a staring contest, and Buffy sighed, finally letting her worry show. “C’mon. You don’t even have to finish it. Please?”    
  
“Fine.” Faith reached out, snatched up the bowl and took three or four sharp, almost savage bites before discarding the curry onto the narrow wood table next to her bunk and giving Buffy a look that was just shy of defiant. “Happy?”  
  
Buffy sighed, willing herself not to yell. Yelling was not productive. “Thank you.” Faith’s behavior was completely understandable, if unhelpful. She just really, really wished she could erase the other woman’s grief and the deaths of two Slayers.  
  
The silence stretched between them.   
  
“Akilah seems to have things in hand,” Faith said at last, her lips twitching in the shadow of a smile. “If I’m very lucky, she may even speak to me again someday.”  
  
Buffy was glad that the distance between them, sometimes so large, was easy to cross in the tiny compartment. She took Faith’s hand. “She respects you. Last night didn’t change that.”  
  
“Yeah. She doesn’t know about London.” Faith’s fingers wound with hers, a little cool to the touch, but Buffy could feel the throb of the younger Slayer’s pulse through her hand. “She just knows I gave the orders that got Jasna killed. So I guess she’ll probably get over it.”  
  
“Stop.” The word was quiet but sharp, a weight of meaning in the single syllable. Buffy gripped Faith’s hand tightly. “Just stop. Jasna had free will, last time I checked. She was brave and competent and she knew what she was doing. She knew the job, Faith.” Her green eyes narrowed, almost colorless in the dark. “She laid her life down to fight the good fight. Don’t take that away from her by blaming it all on yourself. Her death, just like her life, was bigger than you.”   
  
Faith stiffened, grief and buried agony flashing into hot rage in a heartbeat, and she moved before either of them recognized the growl in her throat for what it was. Her right hand drove up into Buffy’s shoulder, half-dragging and half-throwing the blonde across the narrow compartment, and the narrow wall between compartments groaned with the sudden impact before Faith shoved her down onto the twisted pile of blankets. Her dark eyes were blazing in the half-light as she locked her knees down against Buffy’s hips and tangled her fingers in the loose strands of Buffy’s hair hard enough to hurt. “You don’t talk about her,” Faith grated out so close to Buffy’s face that the heat of her breath caressed Buffy’s lips. “You weren’t there and you didn’t know her, and you don’t _dare_ tell me what she did and didn’t lay down her life for.”  
  
“The point,” Buffy hissed, fingers digging into Faith’s arms, “Is that she was the one who made that call. Not you or me or anyone else. Even if she did it entirely out of love for you--and she didn’t, Faith, she also wanted to protect Dawn and her city--it was still her choice.” Face stern, Buffy let out a long breath. “It was not your fault. Do I have to use my fists to get that through your head?”  
  
Faith growled again, a hunted animal look in her face that told Buffy exactly how deeply she had to  be hurting, and then her eyes narrowed to slits and the edges of her mouth curled back in a way that showed narrow glitters of ivory in the dark.  
  
Then she leaned down and kissed Buffy hard - hard enough that both of them tasted blood - and the grip on her hair and her shoulder changed from a pin to something more savagely intimate.  
  
The close, overwhelming heat of Buffy’s desire hit her hard, and she found her own hands tangling in dark hair, pulling the other Slayer down, dragging manicured nails up and down dirty jeans. “Faith,” she half-moaned when she got her breath back.   
  
“B,” Faith groaned into her mouth, and the desperation in her voice was as keen and flashfire swift as the hands that were currently peeling Buffy’s clothes and the blanket into equally tattered pieces.  
  
Every touch was fire, painful and good all at once, and Buffy _wanted_ it, wanted Faith and ecstasy and relief with a deep, aching hunger. Wanted to reduce the world and herself to pure sensation, with no room left for pain or worry.   
  
As she slid her hands up inside Faith’s shirt, the younger woman breathing hot and thoroughly filthy whispers of encouragement, Buffy’s memory threw another night of desperate kissing squarely in her path.  
  
It was Faith’s voice, raw emotion around a core of strength. _It can’t just be fucking in the dark when we’re both keyed up, or when we need each other for comfort.  
  
The real thing, B, because I’ve come too far and I love you too much to sell it cheaper. _  
  
Shit.  
  
Buffy pulled her hands away slowly, gently, and curled her fingers around Faith’s. Every point of contact of their bodies felt so, so good, and Buffy wondered if this wasn’t a punishment of some kind, because holding Faith’s hands away from her skin was the hardest thing she’d had to do in a long time.  
  
“Not like this,” she murmured. Twisting into a sitting position, she kept her grip on Faith. “I’m sorry I upset you.”   
  
“B....” Faith looked up at her, tears on her face and fingers trembling against Buffy’s skin, and the delicate white of her teeth showed as she worked them against her lower lip. “Please.”  
  
Smoothing strands of dark hair away from Faith’s face, Buffy pressed her lips to her companion’s forehead. “Faith. I want you.” Holding the younger woman’s gaze, she wrapped both of those strong hands in hers and tried to remember how to breathe. “I want to do right by you more. If we had sex now, I don’t think I’d be able to look you in the eyes tomorrow.”  
  
“Shit,” Faith swore, unconsciously echoing Buffy’s own thought. Her cheeks flushing sharply, she looked away for a long, trembling breath that just about broke Buffy’s attack of conscience into slivers with the way it made that sleek body move. Finally, breath hissing through her teeth, Faith managed a nod. “I.... fuck, B, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” Hot tears of shame spilled from her lashes, and her fingers tightened on Buffy’s almost painfully tight. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m s...sorry.”  
  
“Shh, it’s okay,” Buffy soothed, pulling Faith into a tight embrace. “Besides, I think I earned like fifty adult points there, so I’m not upset.”   
  
Faith’s choked, tearful laugh was still a flash of warm comfort. “Pirate.”  
  
Buffy chuckled, tears of her own dripping onto Faith’s shoulder. “Arr.” She began stroking the other Slayer’s hair, the action so simple and natural that neither of them gave it a thought, and after a few more minutes Faith quieted and her breathing grew soft and steady. Sleep, it seemed, had been waiting in ambush for her until Buffy’s distraction had let it pounce.   
  
It wasn’t easy to disentangle herself without waking Faith, but she had some practice whose origin she was resolutely not thinking about just now and she managed it.  
  
Dawn’s compartment was right next to Faith’s, with Buffy’s flanking it on the other side, so she didn’t exactly have a long walk back to her bed. It was just as well. She was still tired from the fight in Istanbul followed by not much sleep. She’d never really been the contemplative-walks type, anyway. Walking tended to turn into Slaying, and that was pretty much the opposite of self-reflection.  
  
Her own shades were open, giving her a nice view of the mountains and fields of Bulgaria passing by. She pulled a pillow and blanket out of the overhead compartment, arranged them the best she could, and tried to get comfortable on the narrow berth. Her bruises ached and she wished she had something softer to lie on.  
  
_Great time to have relationship thoughts. Nothing like a series of battles to bring out the romance._ Ironically, given her life, it actually probably _was_ the most likely thing to bring on relationship thoughts. _Which in no way indicates what a screwed-up mess my life has been for the past, oh, ten years or so._  
  
Buffy sighed, and pulled her phone out. Willow was going to be _merciless._   
  
She stared out the window without really seeing anything while Willow’s phone rang.   
  
“Buffy - you’re okay? We’ve all been really worried, ‘cause the reports from Istanbul were pretty short and grim and it sounded like they’re going to need replacements so I figured it had to be bad. And Faith usually calls to send in the report for the Hounds but she didn’t do that either, so I figured it kinda had to be a bad one.” Willow finally stopped for breath, though not for long, and if past performance was any predictor of future results the babbling would kick off again any second.  
  
“Dawn and Faith and I are all...well, in one piece.” Buffy took a deep breath. “Rasha killed Ariel and Jasna and critically wounded Sidik, though we got her to a hospital and they think she’s going to be okay. Tyra has the gorget now, too.”  Tears stung at her eyes, but what Buffy felt most of all was tired. “Faith’s been having a guilt attack on top of her grief. I almost had to tie her down to get her to eat something.”  
  
“Wow.” Willow paused, started to say something, then paused again. “So how did the... um... tying go?”  
  
She let her breath out all at once. “She had a little curry. Not much. It was something, I guess.” Weaving the edge of the blanket in between her fingers, she sighed again.  
  
“She and Jasna were pretty close, I think. I guess that probably tore her up a lot.”  
  
The blanket tightened against her knuckles as she made a fist. “Yeah. Yeah it did. She thinks it’s her fault Jasna died. That if Jasna hadn’t had feelings for her, she’d still be alive.”   _Like just caring about her is dangerous._ “It’s fucked up and I hate it and I can’t seem to convince her it’s bullshit.”  
  
“She’ll get over it,” Willow said in a tone that was not entirely convincing but certainly made a good effort. “You did.”  
  
There was a longish moment of silence, and then Buffy realized that her mouth was hanging open.   
  
“Um. I guess I did, yeah.” She let the blanket go, then threaded her fingers back into it again. “So. How are things?”  
  
“We got the special delivery to the office in Paris and they’re flying it over tonight - it’ll give us something to try out a ritual of unmaking on, which is good. I don’t really think it’s gonna work, but gotta try all our options, right?” Willow paused, and then went into full awkward mode. “Oh, and …. um... a little bird tells me that there’s a rumor about a cathedral in Moldova with all sorts of weird stories and he - I mean, the bird thinks maybe you might want to check it out.”  
  
Buffy chuckled and rolled her eyes. “I won’t faint if you say Angel’s name, Will.”  
  
“But.... I thought we were ixnay on the gel-Anay.”   
  
There was a pause.  
  
“Pig latin does _not_ do him any favors.”   
  
“Yeah,” Will agreed after a moment of consideration. “I’m thinking of rephrasing that.”  
  
“Anyway,” Buffy forged ahead, “Thanks. We’re already heading north but it’s good to have a destination to tell the nice ticket salesman.”  
  
“Yeah. I guess it’s nice to have good news.” There was another pause, this one a little more drawn out, and then Willow cleared her throat. “Is it a thing yet?”  
  
“Uh.” Buffy’s free hand covered her eyes. Maybe Faith had a point about the soothing power of a dark room. “It’s not, but I want it to be. No I don’t. Maybe.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she groped for the bottle of water she’d left on the floor earlier. “Choosing is hard.”  
  
“Well,” Willow prompted, “Is this like, ‘What do I want to eat at the Baskin Robbins?’ or ‘Do I want to have an ice cream cone at all?’”   
  
“More food metaphors?” Buffy muttered to herself. “I want ice cream. I want ice cream a _lot,_ ” she realized as she said it. It was one of those things that had been there for a while, if she looked. All the little moments she and Faith had had on this horrible wild demon chase. All the ways she’d felt lonely over the years, and the impressive catalog of stupid shit she’d done trying to avoid it. The empty feeling in her perfect little house back in England that drove her out onto long walks that invariably ended in trouble. That she still sometimes woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming of Angel with sweat cooling on her skin and her pulse pounding in her throat, and that there wasn’t a moment of the last five years she couldn’t have called to mind the taste of Faith in ten seconds or less. _I definitely, definitely want ice cream. Damn._  “I just can’t decide between Rocky Road and Chocolate Peanut-butter Swirl.”   
  
There was a long beat. “So who’s the Chocolate Peanut-Butter Swirl in this metaphor? I’m getting tall and vampy, but...”  
  
Buffy smacked her forehead. “Yes, it’s Angel, and if you tell him I said that I will find new and exciting ways to hurt you.”  
  
“Always with the violence,” Willow said in mock reproof. “I see how you Slayers are. You talk nice to a girl, get her on the phone in your train cabin late at night, and then...”  
  
“It’s eleven in the morning,” Buffy pointed out in tones of deadly reason. “Nine where you are.”  
  
“When did you learn to do timezones? That’s so not cricket.”  
  
Buffy took a long drink. It precluded inconvenient things like crawling through the phone line to punch your best friend in the face.   
  
Willow was silent on the other end of the phone line for what felt like a small eternity. “So...” she said, trying for casual and landing in hesitant, “the big reason that’s holding you back from getting back together with Faith is potential future not-Angel and not worrying she’s going to, you know, flip out and stab the wedding party?”  
  
Buffy traced her fingers over the upholstered wall next to her. “She’s got some really impressive zen now. I trust her to stay on the wagon.” She sighed, letting her arm fall. You could only trace the same boring diamond pattern so many times. “I know Angel and I are pretty much up there with R and J for being star-crossed, but...yeah.”  
  
“Look... my romantic life has not been with the untroubled, right? But I think I’m on firm ground when I say that you shouldn’t wait around for things or try to make things perfect because when you’ve got a right person or a chance to be really happy, you should take it. Because you never know when you or they are just going to... to not be around anymore, you know?” Willow left that hanging for a few seconds, then audibly perked up - whether she really did feel better or was just acting like it was hard to tell, but Buffy thought it kinda sounded like the first. “Besides, not to be all Miss Wicca New Age, but three of the witches in the Coven have this thing with two warlocks over in Lancaster and that seems to work out.”  
  
Buffy was glad she was on the phone. Her image as a mature adult would be bruised by the bug-eyed look of surprise. _Three witches and two warlocks. Are they a fivesome? Do they all sleep together? Do they all live together? What would that be like? ‘Good morning, honeys, how about a romantic orgy before breakfast?’ ‘Sure thing, baby, I think we have enough bacon and pig’s blood, but do we have enough eggs?’ No, no, I am not having happy daydreams about sitting around the table in jammies with Angel and Faith. No. Nor am I contemplating all the many and varied configurations of sexy-time that could happen. Really sexy. Fuck. Okay, okay, think possessive thoughts. I mean, it totally drove me crazy when I thought the two of them were... I mean.... Crap, was that ‘Don’t touch my sweetie’ jealousy or ‘Why didn’t you invite me?’ jealousy? I hate being left out, they know that...Fuckity fuck. I am not thinking about this. Besides, he’s her sponsor-thingy. That totally has rules against pinning her up against a wall and... not having that thought!_  
  
She cleared her throat vigorously in the hopes it would help with clearing her brain of...unproductive ideas. “Um. Well, that would certainly side-step the whole ‘perfect happiness’ problem.”  
  
“Oh. Yeah.” Willow sounded suddenly thoughtful. “I bet seeing you and Faith doing... you know... would...”  
  
“No,” Buffy groaned, hand over her own eyes, as if that would stop the bad thoughts. _I bet he’d get the most adorably pained look when I… no! Bad Buffy!_  “We are not going there. Especially with that tone in your voice.” _Think unsexy thoughts. Stabbings... wait, no, joint stabbings.... um.... shoes! Shoes. Oh god, heels. Not good. Not good **at all.** _  
  
“So recording the event for magical study would be totally out?”  
  
“Will, I love you, but our continued friendship is contingent upon this conversation ending now.”   
  
“Oh. Right.” Willow giggled. “Bye, then, and... um... sweet dreams?” She hung up before Buffy could curse at her. Again. And the stupid phone was untroubled by her most vicious glare. _Of course it is, the phone can’t feel pain or embarrassment or be horny enough to burn a hole in the floor. Fuck. Maybe I should just lock the door and..._  
  
Faith. Dawn. Train. Evil Demon Armor. **People!**   
  
She composed herself into an attitude of meditation, instead, which had to be good for about a million adult points.  
  
“Dear Powers that Be slash God slash to Whom it May Concern, please remove me from the Supernatural Soap Opera mailing list. Thank you for your time. Love, Buffy.”


	13. Chapter 13

It was amazing what a hot shower, a change of clothes and a nap could do for restoring composure and sanity to the world - or at least for cramming the insanity back into the closet for a while. Dawn Summers had slept badly, which wasn’t surprising when her mind insisted on playing back that blood-soaked slice of horror in Istanbul which her brain was refusing to conveniently localize to the actual stretch of minutes it had occupied. She’d woken up with an ache in her jaw from clenching it and the sense memory of Sidik’s blood clinging to her skin, but that was gone for the moment. It might ambush her tomorrow night, should she live so long, but today she’d assembled all the calm and perspective and composure Giles and Faith had ever taught her. Today she was ready.  
  
Tonight, she was her sister’s Watcher.   
  
_Lunchmeat, bagels, speakerphone, tablet with uplink, scrying ward, magic tomes... looks like I have everything._ She gave the meeting room off the dining compartment one more thorough check, then passed D and Elena standing guard in the corridor on her way to Buffy’s cabin. She gave it about a thirty percent chance that Buffy was actually _in_ her room, as opposed to Faith’s, but she was all about the benefit of the doubt. So she knocked three times and waited a whole minute before she started for Faith’s cabin.  
  
The door clicked open behind her before she’d finished her second step.  
  
“Hi, Dawn.”  Buffy stepped into the corridor, clothes and hair noticeably rumpled. “Is there a demon I can summon to make time stop?” _Some_ one was cranky this afternoon. “Because that was not enough nap.”  
  
“Nap is important. Planning is more important. You know, plan? The thing that keeps you alive later when the Queen of Psychos is trying to kill you?” Dawn gave it her best deadpan, which was pretty good, and managed not to sigh. _When did I start being disappointed that my sister isn’t sleeping with the recovering homicidal lunatic who is also my friend? My life gets stranger every quarter._ “Also, straighten up. You need to look General-like, not … you know... bedhead.”  
  
The General of all Slayers pouted. “Hmph. Who’s there to be unimpressed? You and Faith won’t care.”  
  
“Satsu and Elena and D will. Especially Satsu. She likes it when you look nice - she says it’s good for her morale.” Now it really was a struggle to keep a straight face. “Faith’s, too.”  
  
Underneath the messy hair, Buffy’s glare was less than scathing. “Fine. But I need coffee,” she grumbled, turning towards the dining car. “Caffeine first, then morale-boosting.”  
  
Dawn finally let herself snicker as Buffy stalked away. Then she went to wake Faith.  
  
By the time she got back to the meeting room, Buffy had apparently gotten her coffee and retreated to her cabin, so she busied herself with setting up the speakerphone and the tablet while she waited. It took a little work to get the tablet to talk to the satellite link, but she got it working eventually, and by that time the call she’d put in to headquarters had produced the usual delayed callback.   
  
She couldn’t let that pass without a joke. It would be a break in tradition. “Xander, I didn’t interrupt your lunch, did I? Because I’d hate to think little things like saving the world were getting in the way of fish and chips.”  
  
“Nothing gets in the way of fish and chips. Not apocalypse, not evil psychotic cultists, not alien invasions. Fish and chips, Dawnie, are sacrosanct.” Xander’s pretentious sniff was perfectly British. He had to have practiced it.  
  
“Must you do that? It’s atrocious.” Giles’s sigh was familiar, long-suffering and wonderful. It made Dawn smile just to hear it. “And we do have some food in England which is not fried.”  
  
“He knows that, Giles. He just doesn’t care. It’s like food which is not pizza in America.” Willow sounded tired, but the thought of scoring on Xander obviously perked her up.   
  
“There are other things in America,” Xander objected virtuously. “Like fried chicken, hamburgers, buffalo wings and Chinese food.”  
  
“Also cupcakes,” Buffy called as she closed the door behind her. With a paper cup in one hand, clean clothes, and a fresh hairdo, she looked and sounded like she could take charge. “But they’re everywhere, really. A universal constant.”   
  
“Do they have cupcakes in Africa? I bet they don’t have cupcakes in Africa. I saw a special, and there were no African cupcakes.” Xander paused audibly. “Maybe there’s a cupcake-eating demon in Africa?”  
  
From her place by the window, D rolled her eyes. “No, but there are plenty of man-eating demons.”  
  
“Oh. But you don’t run out of _them,_ do you?” Xander sounded almost hopeful.  
  
“No such luck.” Faith leaned in the doorway for a minute in her battle dress, leather and cotton and a devil-may-care smile, and she looked for all the world like herself again. That was probably a lie, like the one Dawn was telling herself, but there was going to be a lot of that today. “Don’t suppose it’s picky and weeds out the idiots first, D?”  
  
The Kenyan Slayer only grinned toothily.  
  
“So,” Buffy interrupted as she scanned the room, nodding slightly to each occupant as she briefly locked eyes with them. “Everyone’s here on our end. Are you guys at Slayer Base Alpha ready?”  
  
Giles cleared his throat. “As ready as we can be, I’m afraid. We do have a little more information on the cathedral - once we had a place to start, we were able to narrow in very effectively. It’s outside a town named Donduseni, in a village called the Devil’s Cross. Very poetic. How someone had it built there, I cannot imagine, but there it sits. We are very nearly certain now that the helmet is hidden inside - there was an entry about it in the records of the monks of the Order of Saint Kassia. According to the record, the whole cathedral is a sort of puzzle-box and the helmet is locked away there.”  
  
Xander snorted.   
  
Faith’s smile turned wry. “A whole cathedral? Giles, tell me we’re not going to have to get a troll to move whole sections of a cathedral around. Buffy might be a little Supergirl now, but we’re not up to that weight.”  
  
“The records don’t say.” There was a note of frustration in Giles’s voice that he couldn’t quite hide. “They’re very thin, to be honest.”  
  
Buffy frowned in thought. “If the Order of Saint Kassia were human, they probably made the box so that they, and therefore we, could open it. Probably.”  
  
“So we go there, we open the box, we take the helmet, we get the hell out of Eastern Europe. Where’s the problem here?” Faith leaned against the wall, folded her arms and affected nonchalance.   
  
Dawn raised an eyebrow. “Tyra, Rasha, possibly a whole cult of demons and rogue slayers trying to engage you in mortal combat?”  
  
Faith’s lips hardened into a tight little smile. “Thought I asked for problems, Dawnie. That sounds like a bonus.”  
  
“Assuming we kill them and not the other way around.” Buffy shared a look with her second, concern on her face. Dawn watched something pass between them, a silent request from her sister and a subtle, grudging assent from Faith. Both women relaxed ever so slightly, and Buffy broke into a smile.  
  
“So!” Buffy chirped. The sudden mood change induced more than a little emotional whiplash, and Dawn and the other Slayers in the room were left blinking in the sort of astonishment that follows the breaking up of a funeral march by a sudden influx of clowns. “To raise our odds, I have a plan. First,” she intoned, counting on her fingers, “I’ll need a phone.”   
  
There was a brief pause.  
  
“Buffy,” Dawn said slowly, as if it would aid comprehension, “we’re on a conference call right now.”  
  
The blonde threw her hands up. “I know, geeze, I’m trying to be dramatic here. Morale and all.”  
  
Someone snickered. It might have been Faith, but Dawn was afraid to turn around and check. “Drama builds morale?”  
  
The General glared. “Shut up. Anyway. First, I need a phone...”


	14. Chapter 14

"You know," Faith shouted over the rotor noise of the black helicopter that was probably not officially part of the US armed forces in any way, "when you said you had a plan, I was thinking you were talking about what to get for dinner before the fight."  
  
Tightening her grip on the hand rail bolted to the ceiling as the chopper took yet another gust of turbulence, Buffy glared. The effect was somewhat lessened by the faint green tinge in her cheeks. “Do NOT talk about food. If you make me barf on your boots, it’s your fault.”  
  
Satsu and D, grim-faced as they’d been since Istanbul, both ground out a chuckle at that. Faith flicked her eyes at them, seeming to take a cue, and went on with her best who-gives-a-fuck voice.   
  
“Damn, B, and they’re such  _nice_ boots. All official and shit.” Faith had ‘requisitioned’ - bullied, really - full sets of night-camo gear for all four of them, right down to the paratrooper-style army boots and top-end body armor, and she visibly seemed to be enjoying them. Once she’d gotten that far, they’d offered night vision goggles to go with, but she’d just laughed.  _We’ll do just fine without them,_ she’d said with a grin that was all huntress’s teeth.  _We work best in the dark._ “I take back half the shit I said about your boy-toy.”  
  
Airsick as she was, Buffy rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear that. I just hope we can get the chopper home by curfew. Riley was very insistent about that.”   
  
Satsu raised an eyebrow in an otherwise calm face. “You didn’t tell him about the bridge in Istanbul, did you?”  
  
D just smirked, moved to humor in spite of the banked rage still glittering in her eyes. “Or the tower. Or the chapel in London. Tell me, General, is it a strategy to destroy your battle-grounds or do you just like it?”  
  
There was a long moment of Buffy glaring some more. “Ok, I’m barfing on ALL your shoes.”  
  
"That means 'yes, but I don't like to talk about it,'" Faith clarified with indecent cheer, checking the chamber of the submachine gun she'd added to her crossbow, stakes, knives and sword for the evening's festivities. "We locked and loaded, girls?"   
  
Satsu and D made their own quick checks, came up clean and nodded like the thorough professionals they were, under twenty-one or not. Faith shifted her grip on the overhead rail, moving a little closer to the door, and fixed Buffy with her eyes as her voice went as quiet and serious as being heard over the noise around them allowed. "Your Hounds are ready, General."  
  
Expression suddenly serious and adult, Buffy nodded once. “We’re almost there. Good call on the gear. I don’t know why we haven’t looked into armor before, honestly.”  
  
"Something for the trip back." Faith reached up and flipped on the headset wrapped around her right ear, waited for everyone else to do the same, then cleared her throat. "Comms check, one, two, three. Everyone hearing me?"  
  
Dawn's voice came through into all their ears, taut with tension but still very clam. "Five by five, Faith."  
  
"Five by five." Faith's lips quirked with a little grin, and then the loadmaster pulled the door open and the light over the door lit up - amber, warning. "Here we go. Gloves on, everyone - not the time for stripping the skin off your hands. We're going to need them."  
  
Satsu stepped up to the ready-station first, wrapped her gloved fingers around a zip-line and braced herself against the hurricane of night wind spilling through the door. Faith took second chair, and D mirrored Buffy in moving up to take hold of the waiting lines coiled by the door. When the light went green, they were going to do something that broke legs on men twice their size and with special forces training. It was going to be fun.  
  
The light went green, the dropmaster started shouting, and Satsu and Faith vanished out into the night like two stones dropped into a bottomless well.  
  
“Five, four, three, two,” Buffy counted off, tensing her muscles in anticipation of the jump, “One!” In a heartbeat she was falling through nothing towards nothing, the roof of the cathedral a slightly lighter patch of darkness below. The line hummed in her hands as she braked her descent, an identical noise from D’s line beside her, and Buffy hoped that Faith and Satsu had cleared the landing zone. Starting the night with friendly kicks to the head was not part of her brilliant plan.  
  
Buffy’s eyes adjusted just in time to make out the surface of the roof about a second before she landed. Bracing herself with a wide, low stance, she landed on the broken ceramic tiles, rode them partway down the slope of the roof as they gave way, and side stepped onto a more solid section of masonry. D was engaged in a similar dance, and Faith was a crouched silhouette on the peak between two broken-in sections of roofing.   
  
"She's all right." Faith answered Buffy's question before she could ask it, eyes tracking the shadow of the helicopter through the night sky as it moved off. "Came down straight through one of the holes in the roof and had to do a little gymnastics, but she's okay. Well, hanging from the rafters, but they've lasted this long. They're probably not going to fall down in the next minute or so." Finished anchoring the rappel line to what seemed a pretty solid arch of stone, Faith gave it a final testing tug and then tilted to look down through the hole she'd dropped it through. "Close enough?"  
  
"Close enough," Satsu agreed over the radio, her voice subtly breathless but calm. The chord visibly jerked as it took the weight of her jump. "Descending."  
  
Buffy carefully picked her way to Faith across the swiss-cheese-like roof. “Y’know, if Step One was flawless I’d be worried about steps Two through Eight.”  
  
“Because when have we ever had a plan go smoothly, right?" Faith grinned back at Buffy as she let D precede her down the hole, then took hold of the drop line firmly. "By the way, baby, can we do that ride again? I think I kinda liked it." Then she vanished down the hole to the accompaniment of the low whistling hum of her dropping down the line, laughing as she went.  
  
Buffy couldn’t keep a grin from spreading across her slightly-less-green face as she sidled up to the edge of the hole. “Okay, but who’s going to buy the gas for the helicopter?”   
  
When her boots hit the floor forty seconds later - a little too hard, but nothing Slayage-enhanced muscles couldn't handle - Faith was standing there waiting for her with a contemplative look on her face. "I bet Giles would spot me gas money for a chopper," she offered mock-thoughtfully. "Don't you think so, Dawn?"  
  
"No comment," Dawn's voice crackled in her ear. "Besides, I'm thinking you'd rather have something that lets my sister ride sidesaddle."  
  
D, already an invisible shadow among the pillars and ruined confessionals that lined the sides of the cathedral, snorted softly into her headset. "This is a new... how do you say it... euphemism that I do not know?"  
  
Unbuckling the LED lantern from her belt, Buffy narrowed her eyes. Only the lantern saw. “I know where you sleep, people."  
  
Satsu laughed, really laughed, for the first time since Istanbul as she headed for the main doors she was supposed to keep an eye on. "Is that a promise, General?"  
  
Buffy found the switch to the lantern. Unfortunately she was looking straight at the reflector when she clicked it on. “Gah!” Blinking and turning the light away from her face, she sighed. “You will never not laugh at me, will you?”  
  
“Not a chance,” Dawn chuckled over the comm line. “So. Can you see the interior yet?”  
  
“Yeah, soon as my eyes re-adjust.” Buffy held the lantern high and turned in a slow circle, getting a glimpse of the vaults, crumbling furniture, and moldy drapery behind clouds of dust, all while creating some excellently spooky shadows. An abstract scrollwork pattern had been painted, carved, woven, or moulded into almost every object in the room, most of it remarkably intact for such old workmanship.    
  
The prickling sense of  _nearness_ was stronger than ever. She could feel the helm pulling at the edges of her mind, urging her closer, but the feeling was the same all over the church. The monks must have put a spell on the place; the Helm of Vha’al could have been in the keystone, font, or steeple for all Buffy could tell. Like Dawn had warned, they were going to have to find it the hard way.  
  
The gauntlet had started vigorously suggesting demolishing the place stone by stone by the time she’d finished her first look. She blew out a breath and shoved that into a bottle next to the thoughts she was having about Faith. “A little over-decorated, in my opinion, but seems pretty normal for an abandoned cathedral.”  
  
Faith put a deliberate drawl in her voice. “You see a lot of abandoned cathedrals, baby?”  
  
“More than the average.” Buffy rolled her eyes and ignored the shiver up her spine as best she could. “What am I looking for?”  
  
"Not sure. The research I've got isn't of the best. Faith, can you...."  
  
"Video's up and runing," Faith confirmed from a few feet behind Buffy, the broader-aspect light on the handheld digital camera illuminating a wide stretch of weathered carvings above the nave. "I'm going to give you a slow turn so you can take in the whole place, then go for details. Any objections, Q?”  
  
“None at all, Miss Croft.” Dawn made her voice as stuffy as humanly possible, but Buffy thought she picked out the sound of a grin. “Carry on.”  
  
Faith worked her way around in a slow circle by sidesteps, playing the camera up and down the battered walls and up over the half-ruined roof, serving as Dawn’s eyes with the easy familiarity of practice - this wasn’t their first time at this particular game, and the joking intimacy of it was bringing up all sorts of complicated  _feelings_ that Buffy would really rather not be having at work.  _That’s right, feelings, into the figurative bottle. One just for you, nice and comfy. I’ll come back later for you, I promise._   
  
“Stop,” Dawn said abruptly as the light passed over the altar. “Go back and up.”  
  
Faith retraced her path with the light, frowning. “I’m not seeing it.”  
  
“Back up. Back way up - all the way to the middle of the church, maybe all the way back to the font. Will the light carry that far?”  
  
“No, but... Buffy, you have the klieg light?” Faith was already backing up, eyes searching the bema and the apse as she went. “Throw it right down behind the communion rail.”  
  
Buffy swapped the lantern for the spotlight, this time making sure to have it pointed away from her face when she turned it on. The cathedral was instantly flooded with artificial brightness, the abstract scrollwork of the entire sanctuary illuminated in a slightly orange light. Slow funnel clouds of dust moved through the vaults, spurred by the wind and the Slayers themselves, and the shadows near the far entrance seemed that much deeper by contrast. Through the gaps in the walls and vaulted roof, Buffy could see patches of nearby evergreen forest lit up almost as brightly as the interior of the crumbling building.  
  
The blonde clicked her tongue. “This would be a terrible idea if Tall, Blonde and Psycho didn’t already know where we are.”   
  
“Yeah, but who doesn’t love proper lighting for a beatdown?” Faith’s voice was distracted, the quip lacking something in force. “Dawn, are you seeing this? It’s like there’s something.....”  
  
“I see it. Take a half step to the right, and bend a little at the knees.” Dawn’s excitement was a physical electricity in the air. “And... hello, there it is.”  
  
“Damn.” Faith whistled softly, visibly startled. “B.... check the right side of the altar for, I dunno, a switch or something?”  
  
Buffy nodded, but went to stand behind her Captain instead, resting a hand on one armored shoulder. As a general rule, Faith was not impressed by architecture, and Buffy’s curiosity wouldn’t let her ignore such an anomaly.  
  
For a minute, standing behind Faith’s subtle crouch, she just had a vague headache-inducing feeling like her eyes were trying to focus. Then she bent down enough to rest her cheek practically against Faith’s, and the room seemed to resolve itself from an ocean of unconnected scrollwork into a heart-stoppingly vivid depiction of a stone dragon looming above the altar, its wings spread across the whole of the bema and its claws descending to cradle the altar beneath a protective snarl.   
  
Okay. Yeah. The crazy old monks had a little game.   
  
“Wow. And you can only see it if you’re kneeling. I wonder how many heathens it actually kept from seeing it.”  As she stood, Buffy blinked rapidly to clear her vision, and approached the altar, once again a simple brick in a sea of bad wallpaper. She circled it, scanning its sides and the floor for anything switch-like.  
  
“So, should I try stepping on the tiles in a pattern or something? Not seeing anything that says ‘Pull me to open.’”  
  
“Funny,” Dawn muttered under her breath. “Not. Hang on, I’m enhancing the video feed... Faith, don’t move... okay. Mapping the dragon over the close-up of the apse.... got it. Okay. Buffy, is there anything under that stone cross in the middle of the scrollwork? The cross is lined up with the dragon’s heart, so under it....”  
  
Turning to the wall, Buffy approached the cross. The shelf beneath it was covered in a tiny forest of candlesticks in all sizes, shapes, and materials mired in one large congealed pool of wax, a few tallow nubs still lodged in their openings. Frowning, Buffy swept her eyes over the collection for a moment or two.   
  
“Ugh. I hate tests.”  Flicking on the camera build into her own headset, Buffy sighed. “Dawn? Any idea which is the magic bullet?”  
  
“No, but I’d be careful what you touch. If they’ve blessed or hexed the key in some way to deal with people carting around some of Vhal’s kit...” Dawn trailed off. “Well, it starts from boils and moves up from there, is all I’m saying.”  
  
Buffy snatched her hand back from where it had been hovering over one of the simple-yet-elegant silver candlesticks. “Right. Okay. Sounds like a job for not me.”  
  
A gloved hand brushed her hip, the touch familiar and protective, and Faith gently nudged her aside. “Go hover over there where you’re not going to get itchy fingers. I got this.”  
  
If they hadn’t been on the job, Buffy would have liked very much to lean into Faith and...yeah, job. The gauntlet, meanwhile, was getting more and more agitated. Buffy had the  very distinct impression that if she let her mind wander too much she’d blink and find herself in a pile of church rubble.   
  
Positioning herself in the shadow of the column nearest the altar, Buffy tried to focus on strategy. If they were very lucky, they’d find the helm and be flying away before Tyra even arrived; given her luck in general,  Buffy was not optimistic about that. As a second choice, they’d kill Team Tyra and then retrieve the helm.  _Yes, gauntlet. Killing her is totally okay. I will even share in your evil glee._ Worst case scenario, Tyra got the helm and Buffy called in the missile-shaped party favors waiting for her in the helicopter.   
  
She really didn’t want to do that. She’d only just figured out her relational life, after all, and bringing three other Slayers with her wasn’t a fun prospect, either. Especially since one of them was Faith. On the other hand, fireworks. So, you know, not a total loss.  
  
Dawn was rattling on in her ear about medieval symbolism, metal choices and mystical meanings, which would have been more pleasantly distracting if she was allowed to  _do_ anything about them. Rifling the candle box was Faith’s job, and while watching her while she did it would have been  _very_ pleasantly distracting, she really needed to pay attention to things like whether her leggy blonde nemesis was turning up to kill her.   
  
_I am never using that phrase again,_ she informed herself firmly.  _Crazy in the head, crazy in bed only goes so far._   
  
The thought persisted in spite of the rebuke, and Buffy grimaced.  _Why do you gross me out, brain? I treat you, well, pretty good._ Three holes in the wall at ground level, four in the roof, and one high up on the apse. A vampire with strong fingers and determination could enter from any of those, or come bursting through the windows, or even just waltz in through the front door. A diligent Slayer could do the same, and do it easier with equipment. She decided to check in. “D? Satsu? Any movement out there?”  
  
“I don’t see anything, General.” Satsu blinked her green LED from the door, confirming her position and generally living-ness. “Maybe they decided not to get out of bed tonight.”  
  
Buffy winced.  _Brain...._   
  
“Do you hear that?” D’s voice was very soft, almost too low to pick out over the radio. “Low rumble, south... maybe south-east. Could be a car or a truck.”  
  
“Or it could be your heart pounding in your ears. You do remember to breathe sometimes, right? Inhale, exhale, inhale...” Satsu cut off suddenly. “ _ Masaka. _ Yeah, now I hear it. Coming up the pass road, at least two vehicles. Big engines.”  
  
Buffy made for the wall-hole nearest the road. “Everyone getting this? We have incoming in maybe two minutes, probably lots of party people. Dammit, why do we not have rocket launchers? I love those.”  
  
There was an audible pause all around. “You know,” Faith and Dawn said almost simultaneously, “we could totally get those.”  
  
“Awesome. Now we just need to live long enough to play with them.” Buffy crouched in a shadow, peering out into the night. She could hear the engines herself now, and the crunching of gravel and felled branches under the tires. There were no lights, but with a vampire driving, lights were irrelevant.  
  
“One minute. Everyone get ready.” With smooth motions Buffy pulled the Scythe from her shoulder holster and plucked a ‘requisitioned’ grenade from her belt. “Well, Boom-boom, you’re not a rocket, but you’re okay by me.”  
  
Satsu racked the firing lever on her submachinegun and grinned in the dark. “Better toys for better Slaying.”  
  
The trucks - sort of a drab off-gray, maybe military or surplus from the look of them - pulled in to a stop in front of the building, doors already swinging open before they came to a complete stop, and Buffy flipped off the safety clip and pulled the pin on the grenade before throwing it underhand and ducking back behind the stone wall of the church.   
  
A steel hurricane tore through both trucks and peppered the exterior of the wall with sharp metal fragments, and  _things_ \- mostly not people, from the deep bass roar of their voices  - started screaming and snarling in pain. Satsu leaned around the corner and sprayed a magazine into the chaos outside, ducked back through the church doors, then repeated the process. The number of voices crying out was beginning to drop off noticeably.   
  
One of D’s arrows whistled past Buffy’s head by a foot or so, and a dissipating cloud of dust floated past the Slayer General’s face as she turned for a view through the battered doors of the cathedral.  
  
The swatch of grassy clearing outside was a vestibule of Hell.  
  
Both the trucks were burning, hot and fiercely enough that the paint on their flanks was visibly bubbling, and the flickering shadows from the twin spontaneous bonfires was enough to turn the night outside into a forest of shifting motion and color. There were bodies in that mess, bodies that burned with the stench of sulfur as well as flesh, and the scent alone would have been enough to make her gag ten years ago. Probably six, even.   
  
The thought would have made her tired, if adrenaline weren’t busy taking care of that for her.  
  
What was left of Tyra’s attack came on in ragged waves, disorganized enough that they almost came on top of each other. There weren’t many of them left - couldn’t be, after the unexpected explosion had ravaged them - but they were still vampires and old Carpathian things too foul for the books of sorcerers or scholars. Vha’al’s geas was on them, driving them to a bloody-minded fury that didn’t care about injuries or pain or their own highly probable imminent demise, and the only thing to be glad of was that it didn’t look as though Tyra had managed to bring any of her private army of Slayers to the party. This was a pure pick-up team, local talent, and that should have made it an easy fight.   
  
If they weren’t, you know, totally berserk.   
  
Satsu and Buffy gave ground, working their way through the atrium and into the nave, covering each other’s flanks like two seed-pods in a windstorm. Satsu discarded the gun in favor of her sword, a full-length katana Faith swore she carried to the bathroom, and Buffy waded in beside her with Scythe in hand. For a few heartbeats, near the font, she thought they were going to be hemmed in and slaughtered. If it’d been Sunnydale, just her and the gang, they would have been.   
  
D’s bow worked like a metronome, dropping vampire after demon after vampire with wood through the heart or between the eyes (two or more, as necessary), and the wet awful thump of bullets into flesh and the suppressed crack of Faith’s borrowed pistol was a distant reassurance.  
  
It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes - the sheer bloody violence of the combat was too intense for anything longer - but damn if it didn’t feel like hours. Her chest ached from bruised ribs, her pulse was thumping in her skull from sustained effort, and she wasn’t sure how much of the blood on her skin was her own and how much was her enemies’, and she could hear the pain in Satsu’s breathing over the storm of metal clangs and cries that always seemed to swamp a melee. She stepped back and wiped purple blood out of her eyes, putting her back against the font, and looked for the next target. Didn’t find one. Wiped her face again.  
  
_Damn._   
  
Faith’s voice was a little ragged with her own staggered breathing - shooting, from the sound of it, hadn’t been all she was doing - but there was hard defiance in it. “You know, you just can’t get good evil help these days.”  
  
A noise of prim disgust echoed from the darkness shrouding the main entrance. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right. I really thought there would be a better grade of demon in Eastern Europe, but I guess it was all hype.” Tyra stepped into the light, garish armor almost painful to look at against the backdrop of the patterned decor. “I should have known when they demanded their reward in goats. You get what you pay for.”   
  
Blowing a bloody lock of hair from her face, Buffy shrugged. “In their defense, we’re not supposed to have high explosives and machine guns.”   
  
“That was totally cheat-mode.” Tyra sniffed, then grinned in a way that showed  _waaaay_ too many teeth. “I really have to get some.”  
  
Faith brought the pistol in her hands up fast and snapped off a shot, aiming for Tyra’s head, and got nothing but stone. The towering blonde glanced behind her, then back at Faith, and then pursed her lips in a mock-pout. “You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?”  
  
“I was kinda hoping,” Buffy’s Captain replied dryly. “You move pretty fast for a soon-to-be corpse.”  
  
An unidentifiable idea nudged Buffy’s mind, but when she grasped for it, it was gone. Oh well. Stabbing now, introspection later.  
  
“Speaking of corpses, where’s you’re deader half?” The oldest Slayer was already scanning the shadows for signs of movement. “Too much to hope that she’s exploring a new career as kindling outside?”  
  
Someone cried out from the shadows - it sounded like D - and Tyra’s smile turned gloating. “Too much to hope. I hear your little friends in Istanbul are holding a funeral?”   
  
Buffy pulled another grenade from her belt and held it surreptitiously at her side.  
  
Satsu lunged, sword flashing, and Tyra seemed to flow around the Japanese Slayer like water. The katana scraped against the breastplate with an audible shriek, and then Tyra’s gauntleted right fist came around and smashed the shorter girl into one of the pillars hard enough to throw stone chips glittering through the klieg lamp’s backwash. “It isn’t polite to interrupt your betters when they’re talking,” Tyra practically purred. “Don’t you teach your people manners, Buffy?”  
  
Eyes narrowing, Buffy stalked forward, considering the possible angles of approach, the blast radius of her grenades, and if there was any possibility of getting her enemy to shut up.   
  
“ _Fukushite_ ,” the General spat. Hopefully Tyra would think it was a curse.  
  
“I’ll take that as a no,” the platinum blonde preened. Behind her, Buffy could see Satsu following her cleverly disguised Japanese instructions by crawling behind a column. Hoping it didn’t bring the whole building down on them, the General pulled the pin.  
  
“That’s ‘Hell no, bitch!’ to you,” Buffy rejoined, throwing the armed grenade in an over-hand lob that would have made her Little League coach wince with horror. It came within a few inches of clocking Tyra in the skull, which would have been very satisfying, but Buffy was mostly too busy throwing herself flat behind a stone pew to pay close attention. Fifteen meters was the official injury radius on one of those things, Riley had taught her ages ago, which was a lot bigger than it sounded.  
  
The world thundered.  
  
Even over the subtle ringing in her ears, she heard Rasha’s shout. “No one moves!”  
  
_Cool,_ said the part of her brain that wasn’t busy sloshing around from the concussion of the grenade going off,  _vampire panic. Maybe I hit something important._   
  
She got up on her elbows - enough to look around the pew - then went still again. Rasha was pulling D along with her from the shadows where they’d been struggling, which limited her rate of speed, but D wasn’t in any condition to slow her down as much as Buffy might have hoped. The African Slayer was alive - that much she could tell - and not bleeding too badly, but her right arm was hanging at an unnatural angle and she had the dazed look of someone fighting off concussion. The grenade and Rasha’s sudden need for a hostage might have saved her life.   
  
Might still. Panic made the overdressed former Slayer and present vampire look more like the age she’d died at - young and a little desperate.   
  
Buffy couldn’t see Tyra, but she could see blood on the floor. The gauntlet hummed to her in satisfaction.  _A good start. Now just get me around her throat, and we won’t have to worry about her ever, ever again._   
  
_Sounds good, evil demonic consciousness stuck in magic armor. Totally a plan._ It would be okay, too, as long as Buffy was the one giving orders to the gauntlet and not vice versa. As she got slowly to her feet, Buffy glanced to see Satsu reeling but still in one piece behind a column. Faith was wrapped around the base of a pew near the altar, alert and on guard.   
  
Her people. It was a good feeling.   
  
Rasha made it most of the way to the splash of blood that probably indicated Tyra’s current position, then froze. Her eyes flashed toward Satsu, who was shifting toward the right edge of the pillar she’d used as cover against the grenade, and her fangs were bared in warning. “Call off your servants, Buffy Summers. Call them off, or I kill your retainer.”  
  
Hands held up, Scythe left on the floor, Buffy tried to make her voice soothing. “Everyone, stay where you are.”  If she could get Rasha positioned just right, a small push would topple the unbalanced vampire. The tricky part was getting D and everyone else out alive.   
  
Satsu backed up, just a little bit, but she didn’t put her sword down. Rasha hissed at her, obviously dissatisfied, and Satsu - whose eyes were doing a good job of trying to set the vampire on fire - knelt down to rest the blade of the sword against the ground without letting it go. It was a position that looked vulnerable and un-dangerous. Rasha took it that way.  
  
It wasn’t, but she could find that out later.  
  
“Okay, Rasha,” Buffy called, hoping she sounded more reasonable than she felt, “Let D go without additional injuries, let all of us go, and we’ll let you and Tyra go.” She gave Faith and Satsu significant looks to let them know that she was in no way planning to let Tyra leave. “Deal?”  
  
“No deal.” Tyra’s voice was a low, grating sound in the room, a wrecked mockery of her usual bombastic tones, and Buffy caught a glimpse of the rogue Slayer that turned her stomach inside-out. The skin of Tyra’s throat and left cheek were a bloody mess, fragment-torn and ravaged, and her left arm below the rerebrace was even worse - there was a glitter of white visible in the refracted echo of the klieg lamp that was probably bone. Buffy couldn’t see her legs, but the way the red gauntlet on Tyra’s right hand was etching shallow depressions in the stone of the floor she couldn’t be putting much weight on her knees.   
  
The other Slayer should have been dead or unconscious from blood loss by now, and she wasn’t.  
  
Buffy tried to ignore the horror of it--and thought about Jasna and the people in the Parisian club when that failed, because while Tyra’s ruined body wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever seen, it was in the top ten. “Dawn?” The General whispered, shifting her head to give the camera in her headset a better view.  “Call the chopper. Also, why is she still moving?”   
  
Dawn made a sound that suggested she was having trouble keeping her last meal down, but managed to stay on task. “The armor’s keeping her going. Fixing her. Your cuts and bruises have been healing faster since you started wearing the gauntlet and greaves. I think it’s the same thing, but... more.”  
  
“Ah.” Buffy swallowed hard.  _I’m grossed out and she’s getting better. Figures._   
  
“My queen.” Rasha’s voice was a tumble of relief and protective rage, with perhaps the faintest tinge of disbelief.  _Nice to know,_ Buffy thought dryly,  _that I’m not the only one who didn’t see that coming._ “Are you... well?”  
  
Buffy had to smother a snicker at the pained, withering look Tyra gave her henchvamp. “ _Obviously_ not,” she growled. “I’ll be a lot better once they’re all dead at my feet.”   
  
“Not to interrupt your touching concern,” Buffy piped up, “But I’d like to see you try killing me with half a face and one arm.”  
  
“You miserable little  _ cheerleader, _ ” Tyra snarled, “you come out here and I’ll show you exactly how I’m going to fucking kill you. In fact, you fucking do that right now if you want your little friend to live.”  
  
“Not smart,” Faith offered, rising to her feet from behind her pew. “If past-her-sell-by there kills D, there’s nothing stopping Buffy from throwing another grenade right into your face. Somehow, I’m not seeing you dancing out of the way.”  
  
Rasha’s eyes shifted, trying to track Buffy and Faith and Satsu all at once. There was fear in those old, dark eyes - the fear of an ancient  monster that knew a losing position when it saw it, but couldn’t bear to abandon the anchor trapping it there.   
  
If she hadn’t been a murderous, soulless  _thing_ , Buffy might have felt a little sorry for her.  
  
“So those are two of your options, leaving now or death by grenade. Another option is a fight we all know you can’t win, but since that would be dangerous to us I’d rather it not come to that. Alternatively, I can order an air strike that will kill all of us, which, let’s be honest, is the last resort, but still an option.”  Buffy gave her best, perky cheerleader smile. “So. Do you want to walk out of here or do you have a method of death preference?”  
  
Tyra’s mutilated face twisted into an animalistic snarl the likes of which Buffy hadn’t seen since Jack Nicholson told everyone they couldn’t handle the truth. “Big talk, you little bitch, like you ever would.” She took a half-limping, half dragging step towards Buffy, using her good arm to laboriously lift a dagger. With a guttural scream of rage and pain, she threw herself forward into a shambling rush towards her enemy.   
  
A look of victory mingled with mild surprise on her face, Buffy drew her own heavy dagger. Rasha’s hand went for D’s throat, and Faith brought the gun in her right hand up into a two-handed shooting grip. “That won’t stop me,” the vampire snarled at her, eyes gleaming with hot rage.  
  
Faith smiled coldly. “No, but it’s gonna hurt a little bit.”  
  
Then she shot Rasha cleanly between the eyes, the fifteen grams of steel-plated lead slamming into the vampire’s skull at eight hundred feet per second, and the impact snapped Rasha’s head back hard. Satsu was already moving, her sword abandoned to free her hands, and the impact of her body at a full spring against the suddenly slack grip of Rasha’s hands was more than enough to knock D loose. The two Slayers slid into the shelter of the wrecked confessional booths, Satsu shielding D with her body as they went down, and Rasha stumbled forward a step with a bestial snarl as the demon in her tried to rout demands through what was left of her brain.   
  
Faith shot her twice more in the head, hands steady as steel, and the vampire went down to one knee. Spat blood and broken teeth. Shook like a wounded bull.   
  
“Yeah,” Faith said with the calm of a warrior whose heart was carefully sealed away, “that really sucks, doesn’t it?” She hit the release for the magazine and reached for a fresh one. “Want to go again?”  
  
Buffy saw Rasha go down in the background, heard Faith’s quips from slightly behind her, and as Tyra rushed her she saw the battle-crazed Slayer stagger with each gunshot.  “Ooh, I bet that hurts after the grenade,” she goaded as she knocked aside her opponent’s first attack. “I’m kinda impressed you can hear at all, really.”   
  
Punctuating her banter with a solid blow to Tyra’s undamaged ear, Buffy easily dodged another wild slash of the dagger (‘decorated’ to match the awful armor, she noticed) and brought the other Slayer to the ground with a vicious kick to her more damaged leg. Wincing at the fierce, savagely mindless howl her enemy produced, Buffy drove her dagger into Tyra’s exposed throat.  The oldest Slayer watched coldly as Tyra choked on her own blood, her hands grasping at air, glaring murder into Buffy’s eyes. It took longer than it should have for her to die. There was something horrible in that, in the way her enemy’s ruined body clung to life past any semblance of nature or reason. 

  
When the mad fire in those pale blue eyes finally went out, it was almost a relief.  
  
She heard Rasha scream like she was on fire--the vampire was struggling to her feet, blood streaming down her face from multiple gunshot wounds, animated only by desperation - and then the long-dead Slayer hit her like an off-the-rails train. She shouldn’t -  _couldn’t_ \- match Buffy for strength, but she kept coming with a blind rage that didn’t care about pain or injury and Buffy finally had to duck out of reach. Faith was moving to her left, setting up for a distraction or a flank attack, and the two of them circled like wolves as Rasha dropped to one knee and cradled the ruin of her mistress’s body in her arms, searching desperately for some sign of life.   
  
When none came, she lifted her blood-clouded eyes and bared her fangs at Buffy with blind hatred in them. “Everyone you love, everyone you know, everything you’ve ever done - it’s all going to end in fire, Buffy Summers. All of it.” Then her hand came down against the stone of the cathedral, hard enough to break bone and shatter the tiles, and there was a sun-bright flash like the blow-out of a strobelight.   
  
When the spots cleared from Buffy’s vision, there was no sign of the vampire or the body.


	15. Chapter 15

It seemed a little perverse, in the end, that the Helm and Greaves of Vha’al rendered down into a fine gray metal dust that had all the malevolent presence of a dandelion. For an exorcism you expected fireballs, screaming demon heads, contortionists... things like that. Not a fire that smelled like burnt sage, cheery-sounding singing and feeding demonic armor into the braiser like some wacky metal incense. It was pretty much the crowning moment of anti-climax when Willow pulled out a plain wood box and a hand-scoop to transfer the ash to the same final resting place as the Cuisse had gone - some witch’s garden, apparently. Who knew that ex-evil made great fertilizer?   
  
“Can’t you flicker the lights or something? Just a little atmosphere?” Dawn heaved a sigh and looked at the box, the laughter dropping out of her voice as her eyes turned distant and serious again. They’d been doing that a lot lately. “We had to go through a lot to get that.”   
  
Willow gave the young Watcher a slightly maternal smile and shook her head, closing the box up carefully. “Sometimes big things end quietly, and things that start quietly turn out to be big. It’s the nature of the world.”   
  
“Apparently nobody told Hollywood.” Buffy gave her sister’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. They’d been standing just outside the witches’ circle, watching the process in the hopes of getting some closure. Or possibly brownies - there was a rumor that the Circle liked to follow exorcisms with chocolate. “I can pretend to be possessed if you want.”   
  
“Thanks, sis. I can always count on you to look out for me.” Dawn managed a wan smile, then shook off the momentary shadow. “Still no news on our least favorite people in the whole wide world?”   
  
Sighing, Buffy stretched side to side, on the lookout for any unattended baked goods. “Nope. Not a peep. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s bothered by that.”    
  
“They’re on our daily scrying list,” Willow offered. Having handed the box to the gardening witch, she was collecting the candles, herbs and brasier from their places around the dedicated exorcism room in Slayer HQ. Buffy had expected something like an old monastery, but the wood paneling and natural lighting reminded her of nothing so much as a yoga studio. She’d asked Willow about it when she first arrived, and gotten a blank look in reply.    
  
Witches, Buffy had long ago decided, were just incomprehensible.    
  
“D’s arm is mostly healed,” Dawn offered to break the silence which had been busily becoming oppressive. “I’m not sure if she or Satsu is more relieved to have her back to training. I didn’t think they were a thing before.”   
  
“They were both dating Ariel.” Willow finished packing the materials away in their chest and closed it with a firm little thump, giving Dawn a sage smile that had nothing whatever to do with her being in competition for the title of England’s leading gossip-monger. Really. “I think it’s sweet.”   
  
“I’m glad that they have each other,” Buffy said slowly, then paused, looking at Willow with lips pursed and eyes narrowed. “Just how many people here have more than one sweetie at a time?” _No food metaphor. Good brain._   
  
Willow sniffed softly, affecting an air of unconcern. “I have no idea, of course. It’s not like I keep a database.”   
  
“Of course she keeps a database. Just steal her phone.” Kennedy leaned in the door of the room, her sharp black suit not quite hiding the way the last year and a half of teaching Slayers and losing them had knocked the arrogant certainty out of her face. The aristocratic New York accent was still reflexively irritating, but ... but they’d bled together, more than once, and Faith seemed to lean on Kennedy when she needed to lean on anybody. That was more than enough reason to bury whatever hatchet they still had going.    
  
Besides, she made Willow blush and stammer, which was still the most entertaining game in town.   
  
Whirling around dramatically, Buffy grinned at her best friend. “I will not rest until I have learned your secrets,” the Slayer proclaimed, “Or until you share the post-mojo brownies.”   
  
“R...right.” Willow shook herself, then pointed. “Brownies. That way.” She mustered a weak glare for Kennedy. “You’ll pay for ratting me out, vixen.”   
  
“Yeah, I know.” Kennedy just grinned impudently. “It’s going to be fun.”   
  
Buffy was just going to pretend she hadn’t heard that. Life was better for everyone that way.   
  
There were brownies. It was pleasant and they chatted like grown-ups who worked in the same office, like they worked in a place that wasn’t about ducking death or inflicting it, and it was nice for a while. Comforting.   
  
Halfway through her second brownie, Buffy had had her third flash-memory of Tyra’s blood spilling over her hands and her fill of pretend-normal. She hugged her sister, said good-bye to Willow, stuffed a few more chocolatey squares into a napkin and headed for the elevator with as much dignity as the sudden need to be away from people who didn’t understand allowed.   
  
She hadn’t really planned to turn right and head for Faith’s room when she got off the elevator on the ground floor, but once her feet made the decision she didn’t try to argue with it. If she went out the front door, she’d probably just end up taking the tube to London and stalking the streets in search of trouble or going home and restlessly burying herself in the kitchen until she wound up with another half-ton of baked goods. Neither sounded very appealing, and Faith....   
  
Faith understood.   
  
She hadn’t been to Faith’s room since the night in the subway when she’d been sorta uninvited. It felt a little bit like intruding, but only a little bit. Ignoring the doorbell this time, Buffy knocked firmly. Despite past experience, she still couldn’t bring herself to just walk in.    
  
“It’s me,” she called through the door. “I come bearing chocolate.”   
  
“It’s open,” Faith called back softly.   
  
The lights were off, and except for a few candles there was no light in the room. Faith stood in the center of it, a few feet from any piece of furniture, and she was wearing her usual jeans and a tank. No boots, though - she was barefoot on the tatami, her eyes closed and her skin very lightly sheened with sweat. She was working her  t'ai chi forms, slow and fluid as the ripples of a mountain lake, and for a rare moment Buffy was completely, unreservedly in the present. After she closed the door there was nothing in Buffy’s mind but Faith’s strong, graceful limbs moving through candlelight. It was simple and powerful in a way that commanded peaceful contemplation or mindful response.    
  
Quietly, Buffy toed off her shoes, hung her jacket on the doorknob, and left the brownies on the bed.  She circled Faith, drinking in the sight of the other woman’s relaxed focus, and found a moment of stillness that allowed her to step close and mirror Faith’s stance.    
  
Green eyes held brown, and Buffy followed Faith’s forms, half a heartbeat behind and without the same fluid ease born from years of practice, but still the same forms. They danced through a sequence of slow pushes and lunges, and soon Buffy felt an echo of Faith’s calm building in her own veins. Their hands came together as they moved opposite each other, not quite touching, and then they were a perfect mirror right down to the mingled beat of their hearts. It was as elemental as the turning of the world, and untutored as she was Buffy fitted herself to it as eagerly as she had the first time Faith had taught her something that fit all the way down into the anchors of her being.    
  
They were seven years, two months and twenty-three days from Homecoming night in Faith’s hotel room, and right now it felt like the span of a breath.   
  
There were tears in Faith’s eyes when they finally stopped, fingertips to fingertips, an almost palpable energy held between their hands. After a moment of just feeling the heat between them, Buffy smiled softly and laced her fingers together with Faith’s.   
  
“Hi.”    
  
“Hi.” Faith’s voice was a little rusty in her throat, as if it were raw from disuse, but there was a misty little smile hovering at the edge of her lips. “You look better. Less ready to pop if you don’t get out and stake something.”   
  
Buffy’s smile broadened. “Calming martial arts are apparently good for that.” Gently tugging at the other Slayer’s hands, she drifted towards the bed. “Also locking the Gauntlet of Crushing in the dungeon has helped a lot.”    
  
“Your hands look better without it around. I think it was de-moisturizing.” Faith’s lips twitched a little bit with the joke, as if she were trying too hard not to think too much about the sudden proximity as they settled onto the bed together with their hands still linked. “But I meant just now, when you came in. Something was riding you.”   
  
_That_ brought an interesting image to mind, and as heat rose to Buffy’s face she was suddenly very, very glad for the dim lighting.   
  
Shifting her eyes down to look at their linked hands, Buffy sighed. Opening this particular bottle had the merit of driving away the blush, but it wasn’t much fun.  “It was a shitty trip.”    
  
“We mostly survived. Tyra didn’t, and neither did most of the armor.” There was a subtle stress on the word  _mostly,_ a small knot of still-lingering pain in the back of Faith's throat, but the reassuring squeeze she gave Buffy’s hands was unambiguous and firm. “It goes into the book as a win, B.”   
  
The General gave her a grudging nod. “I guess. I just...” She stopped, tears of her own constricting her voice, and she had to swallow before she could continue. “I just wish I could build something good sometimes instead of keeping the bad guys from destroying other people’s good stuff.”    
  
Her Captain leaned over and kissed Buffy’s forehead softly, voice quiet with understanding. “When I get to feeling like that, I go out to the camp in Wales and spend some time with the new girls. They’re so... I dunno, spunky. Annoying, but spunky.”   
  
Buffy laughed the unshed tears out of her eyes. “Just like the Potentials were. I bet Giles would say just like  we  were, too, but I’m not going to ask him.”    
  
“Are we that old, B?” Faith crooked a small grin, looking the smaller woman over with a deliberately lingering stare that was trying very hard to stick to being playful and wound up looking somewhere between hungry and longing. “You sure as hell don’t look that old to me.”   
  
“Lech.” Blushing, Buffy smacked Faith’s knee lightly. “Anyway,” she segued, then stopped again, this time biting her lip and picking at the futon with a sudden concentration. She let herself do that for half a minute, then took a deep breath and looked Faith in the eye.    
  
“I have never gotten a relationship right, I will probably screw up big once or ten times, and part of me never wants to lose someone ever again, but...I’d like to try with you. Building a life. A future. Something good.”    
  
She held her breath.    
  
Faith’s smile was sunrise in the quiet dark of the room. “Lock the door,” she told Buffy in a voice that brimmed with tender, breathless promise. “Then come to bed.”   
  
Giddy with relief and desire, Buffy did as she was told.


End file.
